MUDVAYNE: New Album To Surface In The Fall

After opening for METALLICA on the band's Summer Sanitarium tour, MUDVAYNE spent the holidays recuperating before starting work on the quartet's third, as-yet-untitled, Epic Records release.

Scheduled for this fall, the upcoming album follows the success of MUDVAYNE's first two albums — "L.D. 50" (2000) and "The End of All Things to Come" (2002) — both of which were certified gold. Singer Chad Gray, guitarist Greg Tribbett, bassist Ryan Martinie and drummer Matt McDonough recently rented a ranch in northern California and converted its multi-stall garage into a makeshift studio where they are working on new music.

Despite the relaxing backdrop, the band is pushing itself hard and has already written half of the music for the album. "Establishing clear goals for each song has been the key to MUDVAYNE's quick results," McDonough says. "It's a strange contradiction, but it can be very liberating to set limitations on creativity as long as you don't let those limitations define you," he explains. "It frees up a lot of creative energy when you stop pulling an idea in fifty different directions and start pushing it in one."

It only took Gray a few days to finish lyrics for the first song — a track that encapsulates the undisclosed meaning behind the album. "I spent my time off thinking about the themes we wanted to explore on this album," he says. "When I got to California, that first song just came pouring out of me. It really is an overview of what the album is about."

While the band is characteristically mysterious about the ideas behind the new album, McDonough says the music will reflect a refinement of MUDVAYNE's complexly structured hard rock balanced against more melody than any previous album. Martinie adds "Our goal for the third album is to make music that pleases us because if it makes us happy then the rest will take care of itself."