CHAD GRAY On New MUDVAYNE Music: 'We're Just Trying To Figure Out Where We Want It To Go'

During an appearance on The Jesea Lee Show, MUDVAYNE frontman Chad Gray spoke about the progress of the songwriting sessions for their next studio release. The reunited metallers haven't put out any new material since 2009, which means a decade and a half has gone by without a single fresh MUDVAYNE song.

"We're just trying to figure out where we want it to go," Chad said (as transcribed by BLABBERMOUTH.NET). "Right now, we've got some, you can call them whole songs 'cause they have a start and a finish, but I feel like they're kind of half-songs. I just don't think they're realized yet. I don't think we have figured out exactly how we want this to play out with what we're doing in our business or how we want it to sonically sound."

Gray continued: "Nothing inside of me wants to be the MUDVAYNE of [the band's 2000 debut album] 'L.D. 50'. I think that the more albums we wrote, the better we got as songwriters. A lot of people would probably disagree with me, but [2008's] 'The New Game' is probably one of my favorite fucking albums. It's got like 'Dull Boy' on it, it's got just some really quintessential MUDVAYNE stuff that's not anything like anybody else was doing. I feel like we fucking finally had kind of found our groove. 'L.D. 50', to me, was a very gratuitous, individual workshop, and we put all four pieces together and called it an album."

Last October, Gray told Australia's Heavy that he and his MUDVAYNE bandmates had "started putting some new stuff together a little bit and people that have heard [some of the early demo] stuff are really excited about it. Only the people that are closest to us have heard anything, and, like I said, it's really rough; it's demos," he explained. "But you can tell it's special. And I think that we have to make sure it's MUDVAYNE. We have to make sure that it's what we want. So we'll just have to see. We were working on it, working on it, working on it a little bit here and there.

"We all live states away from each other — nobody lives even close to each other — so it makes it a little bit difficult," he explained. "But we were able to get some stuff demoed up or whatever, but with us being so far apart, it's a little slow going. And then we just kind of hit a wall. We were, like, 'Okay, we've gotta get back into touring.' So we put everything together and we went back out [last] summer."

In August 2023, Chad told The Oakland Press that he and his MUDVAYNE bandmates had "four [songs] in the pipe. I've written each one of them probably three different times, 'cause it's like nothing's good enough," he revealed. "We're gonna keep pushing. We're all getting along really good. We're all talking. Hopefully we all want the same thing from our music, so we'll see. It's definitely the thing that makes the most sense to do now."

MUDVAYNE completed its first headlining tour in over 14 years, "The Psychotherapy Sessions", last summer. Support on the 26-city trek, which was produced by Live Nation, came from COAL CHAMBER, along with GWAR, NONPOINT and BUTCHER BABIES.

Previously, MUDVAYNE made waves in 2022 when they embarked on the "Freaks On Parade" tour co-headlined with ROB ZOMBIE. This 2023 tour, however, marked MUDVAYNE's first headlining endeavor since 2009.

Gray told The Oakland Press that his "main motivation for putting [MUDVAYNE] back together and coming back was our fans", including those who discovered the band during its absence. "There's so many younger kids that are coming up and coming into our world, the metal world, and they're learning about MUDVAYNE," he said. "So you have this, like, the ground's kind of rumbling and it goes out and touches more and more people, but we weren't out there to scratch that itch. You still have your actual fan base but you're accumulating new people. So when we came back it was very exciting for us. It was about our fans and giving those new fans the experience."

MUDVAYNE formed in 1996 and has sold over six million records worldwide, earning gold certification for three albums ("L.D. 50", "The End Of All Things To Come", "Lost And Found"). The band is known for its sonic experimentation, innovative album art, face and body paint, masks and uniforms. MUDVAYNE is Gray, Greg Tribbett (guitar, backing vocals),Matthew McDonough (drums, synthesizer) and Ryan Martinie (bass).

Gray spent 15 years fronting HELLYEAH, which released its sixth studio album, "Welcome Home", in September 2019 via Eleven Seven Music. The disc marked the group's final effort with drummer Vinnie Paul Abbott, who passed away six years ago.

MUDVAYNE did not tour behind its fifth album, which was barely promoted and sold weakly upon release.

Photo courtesy of Live Nation