After going their separate ways following a 2009 self-titled album, it was pretty clear that Mudvayne had accomplished just about everything possible. Millions of albums sold, playing the biggest stages and festivals in the world, and releasing an influential, groundbreaking debut full-length aren’t anything to complain about – yet the band’s recent reunion and successful tours asks the question, will the band release new music?
One wonders what that music might even sound like. After all, Mudvayne had started to pursue a more radio-friendly brand of metal with their later material, though the bass presence of the ever-talented Ryan Martinie was still very present in the framework of the band overall.
According to Revolver, though, the band has been working on new music. What that’ll sound like is anyone’s guess, but thankfully vocalist Chad Gray had plenty to offer when approached with this question. Members of the band, including Greg Tribbett, have been in the studio demoing new material…
“We’ve done a little bit of file sharing or whatever. Just some riffs. Greg went into the studio in Texas. He lived in Texas. He went in there and just laid some stuff down, sent it to Matt. Matt put just a really simple metronome drum beat to it. I was working on it. It’s pretty rad, different stuff. I’ve got a few different angles that I’m working with kind of how I want it to be, my parts anyway. But it’s cool, it’s cool. And obviously we’re not going to put something out if I don’t feel like it stands up.
It’s going to have to fucking blow my hair back before I would put it out, because I wouldn’t want to put anything out and then people are just like, “[They] can’t do it anymore.” You can be your own judge of that. And maybe it’s not the first song, maybe it’s not the third song, maybe it’s the seventh song. That’s like, OK, now we’re on something, but we’ll figure it out, man. We’ll figure it out. We’ll either do it or we won’t. But yeah, I’m down for whatever right now, I’m having fun with it.”
There’s also the question of where the band falls in the current musical climate. After all, the band emerged at the height of the nu-metal phenomenon, yet managed to continue maintaining relevance even as tastes changed. Would they have the same success they did in previous eras? Drummer Matthew McDonough also addressed this:
“How will that come together? I’m sure there’ll still be some aspects of the file sharing sort of experience. But I mean, I think you mentioned, as well, the culture of the industry, the music industry’s changed. I mean, it was changing dramatically all through the 2000s. And since in the past 13 years now, I mean, there was no such thing as Spotify. The last time that Mudvayne went onstage, I don’t even know if there was Pandora at that time. So how it all works out, but we’ve always been a kind of band. We don’t really set out with a clear trajectory, landscape, mapping, a map of where we want to get with our music. Normally we just start messing around.
What’s it going to sound like? I can’t honestly say. Some of the stuff that we have messed around is heavy. We messed around with some typical [sounds], people wouldn’t be terribly shocked, but the opportunity to experiment and given our past success, I think I feel a sense of freedom. There hasn’t been any kind of pressure from any professional direction to try to, ‘You guys going to write another ‘Dig.” Or ‘Not Falling‘ or whatever, nothing like that. So the headspace and the culture around the band right now is incredibly positive. So I personally just would like to be wide open and excited and positive about it. I want to be surprised.”
Any way you slice it, Mudvayne have been able to capitalize on their music somehow becoming more popular during their long hiatus. The question is, will their potential new music live up to the pedigree their discography carries? Only one way to find out.
