Machine Head’s Robb Flynn recently spoke with Jason Ellis of SiriusXM about their new album Catharsis, which is scheduled to be released January 26th through Nuclear Blast. The frontman spoke about the writing process and how the album is more melodic and groovy, rather than heavy.

“I’ve been telling everybody, ‘Keep your expectations low for the heaviness’. It’s a very grooving, very melodic record, and it’s kind of freaked people out — understandably, I guess. It’s got some pretty melodic moments, man. This isn’t us at our heaviest. To me, if ‘The Blackening’ was us at our most thrashing and most heavy, this is probably us at our most grooving and most melodic. And it’s still heavy, it’s great songs, it’s just… it’s a new trip, and I dig it, man.

During their chat, Flynn mentioned how there was no plan to the writing process,

“We just start writing. There’s never a plan. We just started writing, and it came out the way it came out, and it was just cool. That was the shit that got our dick hard, and we were, like, ‘Fuck! Let’s go with it’. To me, Keith Richards summed it up best. ‘We’re just a vessel and we’re just channeling what’s going through us’.”

Catharsis was co-produced and mixed by Zach Ohren in Sharkbite Studios and mastered by Ted Jensen in Sterling Sound. You can pre-order the album here.

If you haven’t listened to the first track off the album, do so now.

[via blabbermouth]