About three years after shaking the global rock scene with Once More 'Round the Sun, Mastodon have released today through the label Reprise which is their seventh studio album, Emperor of Sand. The album have 11-track,has been produced by Brendan O'Brien, who also was in charge of their acclaimed LP Crack the Skye in 2009 and also is a return to their conceptual album style, in this case with an Emperor telling the story of a desert wanderer that has been sentenced to death.
Along the album, the band from Atlanta explore themes of life, death and survival, becaming a metaphorical tale that was inspired by the band's family members' battles with some deseases, as drummer Brann Dailor had said in an interview on Rolling Stone "Bill Kelliher's mom was going through cancer and he's kind of far away from her… And my mom's also sick as well and being far away there's not a lot you can do. You know we were done writing anyways, but we kind of needed something to occupy some hours of the day that would've been kind of us sitting there worrying about the situation that you don't really have that much control over. A good way to honour your people is with your art. We just would go down to Bill's basement, we got a little studio down there, and we just kinda riff out and see what we were liking and biting on, and low and behold a bunch of months later we had like 15 great song ideas that got down to somewhere about nine or 10 great pieces".
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