Artist Direct recently sat down with Mastodon to get a status update on their follow up to 2006's highly acclaimed Blood Mountain.

We finished the bulk of it. All of the basic tracks are done. We finished them on the Monday before we flew out to Seattle to start this tour. We go home on August 23rd. Then we have 10 days booked in the studio to touch up things, add any bells and whistles, take away anything we don't want, mix it and then figure out the sequencing. We have until Labor Day to finish it. We're hoping that it comes out in January. It should see light at the beginning of 2009.

The band are working with Brendan O'Brien (Pearl Jam, AC/DC, Bruce Springsteen, Rage Against the Machine) as the producer for the new record, with the lyrical focus set to explore topics relating to Czarist Russia.