Meshuggah's Marten Hagstrom: New Album is 'Pretty Diverse'

Meshuggah guitarist Mårten Hagström stopped by Hatebreed singer Jamey Jasta’s podcast recently and the two musicians covered a lot of topics, including Meshuggah’s upcoming album. Hagström told the frontman that they are in the early stages of writing the follow-up to their 2012 disc Koloss and that it is shaping up to be pretty diverse.

The guitarist continued (as transcribed by Blabbermouth), "We're early in the writing stage… We're writing right now, but we're really early still. And me personally, I'm really attracted by the idea of taking something that is really household in metal. 'Bleed' is a good example that Fredrik [Thordendal, their guitarist] wrote. You have like a triplet thing that is so f--king generic metal that it can't possibly get any more generic. But you do something with it that makes it come into a new territory. Put a little bit of a different [spin]… Not astronomically just rewrite the whole f--king thing, but just tweak it a little bit. And I'm really attracted to that.”

Hagström went on, “Right now I'm doing this song that, in essence… it's the most tragic metal song you would ever hear, but it doesn't come across that way 'cause I just tweaked it that extra mile. And I know Tomas [Haake, their drummer] and Dick [Lövgren, their bassist] have been working on a lot of stuff that is really out there. So I think it's gonna be a pretty diverse album." You can listen to the full podcast below.

Meshuggah just got finished playing Kirk Von Hammett’s Fear FestEvil in San Jose, Calif. They were joined by the likes of High on Fire, Agnostic Front, Orchid and more.

Mårten Hagström on The Jasta Show