NEIL FALLON Hopes To Have 15 Songs To Choose From For Next CLUTCH Album

In a new interview with Bloodstock TV's Oran O'Beirne, CLUTCH frontman Neil Fallon confirmed that he and his bandmates recently completed the first demoing session with producer Tom Dalgety for the group's follow-up to the "Sunrise On Slaughter Beach" album, which was released in September 2022. He said (as transcribed by BLABBERMOUTH.NET): "We're gonna try to maybe do [another session] in January and then another one right before we record. Hopefully we'll have 15 tracks and then we'll pick maybe the 10 best release those and maybe save some for a rainy day."

Regarding CLUTCH's working relationship with Dalgety, Neil said: "Tom's great. I think sometimes working with a producer, personality is half the battle because they can have all the skills in the world but if they're an asshole, you don't wanna work with them. Tom is anything but that."

As for whether CLUTCH fans can expect to see the band's next studio LP in the spring or summer of 2025, Neil said: "No, it would be probably the third quarter. Nowadays, you've gotta have such a buffer. It's getting better with vinyl, but we have to plan that in way in advance."

O'Beirne also asked Fallon about the possibility of CLUTCH playing some of the new material live before it is released. He said: "Yeah. we try to. That doesn't always happen. Playing a song live in front of people is a much different animal than doing it in a studio where you can stop and say, 'I have to go to the bathroom.' There's an urgency that will change a song. Sometimes something sounds great and then you put it on stage and it may be not so much, or vice versa. So we like to do that."

Last month, Fallon told Neil Jones of TotalRock that he and his bandmates have "been getting together, on and off this year, just writing. And then that sometimes that just means writing a riff, not necessarily a song," he explained. "But right now, as we speak, behind me, Tom Dalgety, he flew in from Bristol [United Kingdom] a couple nights ago and he's done a load of albums, he did our last record, 'Sunrise On Slaughter Beach'. We're doing a pre-production session this week. We'll do another one probably in January. And then again, right before we record, hopefully in March. And what that means is we're just kind of fleshing out these demos. So when it comes time to record them, we know them and don't have an excuse to say, 'I don't know how to play this song.'"

Asked how far back the musical ideas on those demos were originally captured, Fallon said: "I think maybe the first ones are maybe from March of last year, but it was pretty piecemeal 'cause we'd go out on the road and then no one really wants to get together after a show and say, 'Hey, let's jam.' So, it was kind of piecemeal, like I said. But there's a riff that Tom said we did on the last session almost three years ago that he'd like to kick around that was actually from — I think we've been kicking that riff around since [2015's] 'Psychic Warfare'. It's sort of like this orphan riff that — it's good; it just needs to find some friends to live with."

Regarding how he comes up with the themes for his lyrics, Fallon said: "I wish I knew there was a very succinct system on doing this. But I'll come up with lyrical ideas. I'll jot 'em down in a notebook or in a voice memo on my phone and I'll come up with an idea for lyrics. And sometimes they seem to write themselves. Other times I'll say, 'Well, they don't really sound that good. Let's try it on this song.' And eventually, it's like… I don't know. You whittle away at stuff until you find its final form. I find that songs that have stood the test of time are the ones that were the quickest to write. The ones that take months, but usually those don't last very long as far as live rotation on stage."

Asked if he and his CLUTCH bandmates are thinking at all, while they are working on new material, about how the songs are going to go down in a live setting, Fallon said: "No. And I think that's one of the things that CLUTCH fans like about us. I think there's a sincerity. If you kind of premeditate it, then it becomes less of an artistic enterprise and more of a marketing scheme. And I think because if we like it, then by extension CLUTCH fans like it, because that's what we're all here for, as far as this band goes. There's been occasions where we've had songs and I've listened to it, and I said, 'I don't know. I don't know about this thing.' And then that became to be some of the most popular songs that we put out. And so I'm not a good judge of that."

Earlier last month, CLUTCH drummer Jean-Paul Gaster told Colombia's El Expreso Del Rock about his relationship with his bandmates: "We see each other all the time… 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, 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."

In a separate interview last 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."