Mastodon are getting the jump on some new material according to drummer/vocalist Brann Dailor. The musician posted a shot to Instagram (taken from behind his drum kit) of guitarist Bill Kelliher in the studio.

"New music? Yep." is how Dailor captioned the photo, which can be viewed below. The post indicates the band are ahead of schedule, as back in the summer Dailor said the songwriting process for album number eight was likely to begin sometime in early 2019.

"We're always a work in progress, trying to figure out what we're going to do next," he told Consequence of Sound in August, adding Mastodon has been setting aside ideas for the future, occasionally, "saying out loud what those ideas might be" and that the ideas are sometimes created during soundcheck or backstage. "You hear somebody noodling, and you're, like, 'Oh, what's that?' Whenever the ears perk up to either Brent [Hinds] or Bill doing something backstage, that's always a nice little surprise."

"Once we get home, and we decompress from the Emperor Of Sand tour cycle, sometime early next year, we'll start dumping out the riffs and seeing what's new and seeing what's fresh and what we're digging on, and then we'll just start working — do what we normally do," Dailor added.

Emperor of Sand came out in the spring of 2017 and in its debut week was the highest-selling album in the U.S. Mastodon also ended up with a Grammy win for Best Metal Performance for the single "Sultan's Curse." A few weeks back, Hinds revealed that a hit-and-run accident on his motorcycle prevented him from attending the ceremony.

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