JEAN-PAUL GASTER: CLUTCH Is 'Refining' New Song Ideas Before Recording Next Studio Album

In a new interview with Colombia's El Expreso Del Rock, CLUTCH drummer Jean-Paul Gaster spoke about the progress of the songwriting sessions for the band's follow-up to the "Sunrise On Slaughter Beach" album, which was released in September 2022. He said (as transcribed by BLABBERMOUTH.NET): "At the moment, we have about eight or nine new song ideas, and our friend Tom Dalgety, the same producer from before, he's gonna come and hang out with us next week. And we're gonna start working through those ideas. And we will not record an album [next week], but we will work on these ideas and sort of refine them, perfect them, and then at that point, we're gonna set those songs aside and then we'll write another batch. And then from there, we will make the record."

Gaster also talked about his relationship with his CLUTCH bandmates, saying: "We see each other all the time. This week we are off because some people are off on vacations and holiday. But on Saturday afternoon, we get back together again. We will rehearse, and then we will get ready for Tom to come in, 'cause he will come in on Monday and we will work all week. Typically, we will finish a tour and maybe take a week, maybe two weeks off. We just kind of go home and do home stuff, but then we're back in the jam room again, and it's usually three times a week. And usually when we get together, we're writing new music. Unless there's a show coming up, we just start playing riffs. And we have all the equipment always mic'd up, the computers, they're ready to go. So the minute somebody has an idea, boom, I go push 'record' and we document that idea. And sometimes that idea becomes a song, and sometimes that idea is just something that we did for an hour. But it's okay, because you have to keep playing."

He continued: "Sometimes I play with musicians in projects and stuff, and they become sort of very focused on one idea: 'Oh, this is the song and this is the idea, and this is the only one that there is.' We try not to do that. We try to come up with many ideas. 'Okay, that idea is cool. Great. Let's try something else. Let's see what this idea will be like.' And we just try to put as many of these things together. And then when it comes time to make a record, then we go through those things. We say, 'Oh, well, that thing we did last month was really cool.' And then, 'Neil [Fallon, CLUTCH singer], you have this new riff. Okay, well, let's put those together. That might be cool.' And that's the way it works. It's very organic. There's not a set way that things come together."

Earlier in the month, CLUTCH bassist Dan Maines told Chile's iRock that he and his bandmates were "in the middle of some deep writing sessions. We've been getting together quite a bit, but it's all focusing on new material, trying to write songs for a new album," he revealed. "It's going really well. We get together in a studio and we are just recording every single idea that we have. If it gets to the point where we've got two parts together that kind of resemble a verse and a chorus, and everyone's happy with it just music-wise, we'll record those ideas. And then we put that aside and move on to something else. And we upload those files so that all four of us can listen to them at home. And Neil will take a good hard listen to them and think about vocal ideas for those parts. And we start piecing together things. Sometimes he'll listen to something from one day that he thinks might work really well with something from the previous week. And if it requires tempo changes or key changes to kind of blend those two parts together, we'll work on that. But, yeah, it's kind of a very organic process. Right now I would say we have probably about a solid 10 ideas that you could call songs, but they definitely need a little more fleshing out. But, yeah, it's exciting."

Offering a rough timetable for the rest of the writing sessions for CLUTCH's next LP, Maines said: "We'll go down to South America for the week's worth of shows [in late July 2024] and then come back and try to do some more writing before we get into full kind of tour mode, which is summertime. We're heading over to Europe for European festivals, and then we have a lot of touring that picks back up in the fall here in the U.S. So we're trying to get all of our writing done now as much as possible. And it's going pretty good."

Asked what music inspires him and his CLUTCH bandmates these days, Dan said: "Anything, everything. Between the four of us, we kind of draw from a lot of different sources and we try to take those influences, whether it's blues or something more heavy, doom-oriented or something funky, and just kind of put it in a blender and create something new out of it. But sometimes, like the last time we got together, we were thinking, 'Well, let's try to write something uptempo, something above 100 beats per minute.' And at the end of the day, we came out with something that we all thought was great, but the tempo was, like, 70. So you can go in with one idea or one direction, but at the end of the day, what you end up with could be completely different. You just never know what's gonna come out."

"Sunrise On Slaughter Beach", which was recorded at the The Magpie Cage Recording Studio in Baltimore, Maryland, was produced and mixed by Grammy-nominated producer Tom Dalgety (GHOST, ROYAL BLOOD, PIXIES),with additional engineering by J Robbins (JAWBREAKER, AGAINST ME!, THE SWORD).

This past April, Fallon confirmed to TotalRock's "Hobo On The Radio" show that he and his bandmates were working on new music. "I am definitely the slowest out of the bunch as far as writing lyrics, 'cause I try the same lyrics on different songs and try to find out where they can live," he said.

He continued: "We probably — we won't be recording until next year. And I'm gonna say hopefully the album will come out in the third quarter or fourth quarter of 2025. Which sounds like it's far away, and I guess it is, to a degree, but that's gonna come around pretty quick for us. We're gonna do it with Tom Dalgety again. He was awesome. But that never stops us from playing these [new songs] live, which they'll inevitably will be everyone's favorite version and they'll hate the record's version, but that's just the way it goes."