Monster Truck
It wasn’t broke, so there was nothing to fix with album three, says their guitarist. “We want people to get what they expect.”
“If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” say the hard-rocking Canadians, as they finesse their established formula on new LP.
Our sound today is close to what it was in the inception of the band nine years ago and we’re sticking to it,” says Monster Truck guitarist Jeremy Widerman. “Sometimes my favourite bands have changed too much too fast. We are careful to avoid that. We want people to get what they expect.”
And why not? The chest-beating, southern-tinged rock all over their debut album Furiosity and the 2016 follow-up Sittin’ Heavy won the band plenty of fans, plaudits and career-boosting support slots (more on that last one later). But while the Truck’s as-yet-untitled new record might be in the same vein as Sittin’ Heavy, Widerman is confident that it’s also a step up.
“I hate saying stuff like this,” he says, “but everyone is saying this will be our best record yet. I’m not sure I could have confidently said that before we released Sittin’ Heavy. We liked it, but we weren’t sure it eclipsed everything else we had done. It wasn’t worse than the first album, but it wasn’t decidedly better. It was more of a case of it being just another Monster Truck record. We want to go bigger this time. We want everyone to go: ‘These guys aren’t fuckin’ around.’’’
Widerman enthuses that the band recently hit a creative purple patch, writing more than 30 songs in a rare three weeks at home between tours. The plan was to record in the early summer, but then the matter of a support slot on Deep Purple’s European tour came up. In fact, when Widerman speaks to Classic Rock, he’s deep in the bowels of Berlin’s Mercedes-Benz Arena where they will be playing the penultimate show of the tour.
While Monster Truck may have fallen a little behind schedule, he says the band will enter the studio in the coming weeks to work on the new record, with SikTh’s Dan Weller the somewhat surprising choice of producer.
“It’s a left turn for us to go with someone younger and outside of the continent,” Widerman admits. “A lot of people expected us to go with a gigantic, Grammyaward-winning name. We decided to go with someone that’s hungry and is willing to go the extra mile every night with us.”
And what rewards does Widerman envisage being in store for going that extra mile?
“We want to quadruple our fan base with this album,” he says. “We want to do that to the point where the majority of people getting into the new record don’t realise we’ve been together for almost a decade, and they can go back into our back catalogue and get into that as well.”
“EVERYONE IS SAYING THIS WILL BE OUR BEST RECORD YET.”
JEREMY WIDERMAN
ETA: Early 2018