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Their biggest album, their longest tour yet – Mastodon hit their prog stride with 2009’s Crack The Skye, emulating their 70s heroes with an astro-political conceptual masterpiece. In 2010 drummer Brann Dailor told Prog about how their fourth album came together.

It may seem a little odd now, but when Mastodon started out in 1999, most people believed they were a metal band – nothing more. It was only when the conceptual Leviathan album was released in 2004 that everyone noticed they actually had a lot more sophistication and complexity to their musical aspirations than could be accounted for by any abiding interest in metal. It’s a point that drummer Brann Dailor, is keen to make at once.

“For us, the most important era in music – the one that really inspired what we do – was the early 70s. It was all about bands experimenting, taking risks, without thinking about the commercial problems they might be causing for themselves. It was the artistry that mattered.”

When Dailor names the specific bands with whom Mastodon feel most associated, you appreciate that they’re a progressive act who happen to have metallic elements, rather than a metal band who’ve indulged in other types of music.

“We embrace the spirit of early 70s prog as being the way that you should always approach music,” Dailor says. “When you listen to the fantastic albums made by King Crimson, Yes, Genesis, Pink Floyd… we’ve wholeheartedly taken on their ethos. They taught us that you didn’t have to dumb anything down to make your point. On the contrary, it was – and is – important to stick to what you believe in.”

He should know what he’s talking about – it’s mainly down to him that Mastodon took their current musical path of making concept albums. “I plead guilty to that, which means you either buy me a drink, or poison me, depending on whether you feel it’s something Mastodon should be doing!” he laughs. “I was reading Moby-Dick when it struck me that it could make a good storyline for an album, and that’s how Leviathan happened. Since then, we’re just far happier working within a conceptual idea.

What he doesn’t mention until pressed by Prog is that he’s also the person charged with coming up with the initial concepts. “I’m the one who has the first thoughts along those lines. I can get inspiration from almost anywhere, but what I might put forward to the others [guitarist/vocalist Brent Hinds, guitarist Bill Kelliher and bassist/vocalist Troy Sanders] isn’t anywhere close to the final story.

“All of us play around with the ideas, until we work them into a shape that makes some sort of sense to us. I always try to ensure that what I first propose is something I know the others would appreciate: after all this time, I know them well enough to reject anything I believe they’d hate without even thinking.”

Dailor has already come up with the basic concept for the successor to 2009’s Crack The Skye. And Mastodon are already working on the songs to bring this fresh story to life. “I don’t want to give away too much as this stage, but like everything we’ve done so far it is partly mythological in structure. Does it have anything to do with Crack The Skye? To some extent there’s a connection, but it’s a loose one.

“It’s what keeps us going: the opportunity to go further than we’ve ever done. And this time there’s a lot to live up to. The music is still heavy in parts – that’ll never disappear – but there’s also a groove that I’d describe as being close to mid-70s Led Zeppelin.”

Dailor is more than happy with the commitment made to Mastodon by current label Warner Bros. “This is the last album we owe them under the current agreement, but I hope they decide we’re worth picking up for a contract extension. We’ve enjoyed working closely with them.

“And it’s not their fault we haven’t had huge sales. It’s the times we live in. Someone recently told me that if you took into account all the illegal downloading that goes on, then the 350,000 sales we had with Crack The Skye probably equates to over a million copies in earlier days. How do I feel about it? It’s hard to have an opinion, because that’s going to change nothing. I’m just happy we have a career.”

However, there’s one disappointment as far as Crack The Skye is concerned. Such was the visual potential and breadth of the storyline – taking in Czarist Russia, astral and time travel, wormholes and religious beliefs – that the band hoped to turn it into a movie. Dailor admits they’ve had to let such ambitions drift away to join so many other dashed dreams.

“It’s something we really did wanna do,but in the end the cost was just against us. We spent all the budget we had on getting the clips done which were used as backdrops for the live shows; I think that was money well spent. Right now, the only hope we’d have is if the four of us took time out to write a treatment for the proposed film, and then one of us gets all done up in business clothes and tries to sell the idea to a movie studio in Hollywood. It might work, but that’s not what we’re about at all. So we’ll put this one down as the ambition which got away.”

Although their new album right at the core of plans for the coming months, there are also a series of summer shows coming up. There’s just a possibility that they’ll debut at least one new song. “The problem is that every time we’ve tried this sort of thing before it’s gone so wrong. We’d have to be really careful to choose the right sort of track. In all honesty, we might chicken out.

“I just love the fact that each year seems more full on than the previous one. Someone, somewhere always appears to have plans for us!”

In the garage at the storied Grandmaster Recorders studio in Hollywood – it’s a trendy restaurant now, the heathens – there’s a wall full of bullet holes and a helpful piece of graffiti above. It reads: ‘Tool shot me here’.

This damaged concrete wall is producer Sylvia Massy’s fault and this is how it happened.

Massy had worked on the band’s 1992 mini-album Opiate and her professional reputation as an engineer, mixer and producer led her to work with Prince at Larrabee Sound Studios. She was offered the opportunity to work with him at his Paisley Park complex in Chanhassen, Minnesota, but she declined.

“I wanted to do the Tool record,” Massy told Grammy. And Tool wanted to work with her again, too.

“Working on Opiate with Sylvia Massy had gone so well we decided to use her again, and we also had the same assistant producer and engineer, so it was a real similar vibe,” drummer Danny Carey told Revolver “But because we had a little bit of success with Opiate, we didn’t feel like we had to get in and out of the studio in three days or we were gonna be broke, so we took about three weeks recording it. We had enough faith in the success that was gonna be coming to us that we decided to take a little bit longer, and it shows.”

Part of Massy’s method of working was to simply capture the band’s live energy in a studio setting and offer outlandish creative ideas throughout the recording process.

“Some of my suggestions were accepted and some were rejected, and I am always OK with that,” Massy explained. “I suggested we record a transient Peruvian flute band and hide it subliminally in a song, they went for that.

“I suggested we keep and use all of Maynard’s heavy breathing,” she adds. “They went for that. I even suggested we buy two old upright pianos and record them while they were being destroyed with sledgehammers and a shotgun. They went for that.”

Keenan, who’d previously spent time in the military, was the perfect choice to try out Massy’s idea. Wearing ear defenders, the vocalist discharged a pump-action shotgun into a derelict upright piano which was stood next to the studio’s garage wall.

This wasn’t a simple thing to do. In fact, Massy later drew up a technical setup blueprint for the mic placements and the shot spread in a diagram titled ‘How to Shoot a Piano’.

Rollins Band guitarist Chris Haskett also took a sledgehammer to what remained of the piano carcass.

“There were other odd sonic experiments on Undertow, as well – including on Intolerance, where Jones used a vibrating Epilady hair remover to achieve some truly wild guitar noises,” Haskett told Guitar Player.

Both Keenan and Haskett’s destructive efforts were recorded and sampled on the closing song Disgustipated (a made-up word first uttered by Popeye in E.C. Segar’s original Thimble Theatre comic strip in 1935).

The nightmarish song appears as track 69 on CD copies of Undertow – yes, yes, we get it – and follows the song Flood after 59 silent tracks. It’s disorientating, like half-hearing a strange film during a nap. There’s fevered talk of crying carrots being harvested and the sounds of sheep. The repeated refrain of ‘This is necessary! Life feeds on life!’ was inspired by their 1992 performance at an anti-vivisection benefit at the Hollywood Palladium which featured Keenan firing a shotgun inside the venue (the rounds were blanks).

“[The crowd] thought we were assholes,” Keenan told Revolver. “Of course, we were amused with ourselves, and that’s all that really mattered.”

The song is followed by the sound of crickets and a similarly odd monologue left on an answering machine by someone named in the album liner notes by ‘Bill the Landlord’. That’s Bill Manspeaker of Green Jellÿ, who owned the Los Angeles loft where Maynard lived.

Places like Reddit are full of fans pontificating about the album closer’s true meaning – ‘it’s about religion’, ‘it’s about veganism’, ‘were any carrots actually harmed?’ and so on – but if you scratch beneath the surface, this 15-minute experiment is simply the sound of a singer letting off steam by firing guns at a piano because someone said it would be a fun idea. Well, you would, wouldn’t you?