Drummer Jean-Paul Gaster of Maryland rockers CLUTCH spoke to Full In Bloom about the band’s plans to work on the follow-up to 2018’s “Book Of Bad Decisions” album. He said (hear audio below): “It’s tough now. The climate that we’re in, with the way the world is going at this point, it’s difficult to plan something like an album release. Speaking for myself, I would prefer to have a full, big collection of songs come out where we can actually go out and tour behind those songs. The idea of recording a record and not being able to play that record live is a little strange for us at the moment, just because we’re very much a live band.”
Asked if there are any new CLUTCH releases in the works for the coming months, Gaster said: “We’re getting ready to put together a vinyl collection of all the ‘Vault Series’ material that we’ve released over the past, say, year and a half. These are songs that we recorded in batches in the studio — not necessarily with the intention of recording a full record, but mostly just going in and recording a few of the songs. So we’ve released each one of those as as single, and now we’re gonna compile all those on to a piece of vinyl. And that’s probably gonna be released sometime close to the end of the year or maybe shortly after the New Year. That’s gonna be called the ‘Clutch Weathermaker Vault Series Volume 1’. That’s got some covers on it and some re-records of songs that we’ve recorded before.”
CLUTCH released its twelfth studio album, “Book Of Bad Decisions”, through its own Weathermaker Music in 2018. Rolling Stone described the album as “bathed in the grit and liberal fuzz tone that has made their live shows legendary.” The band embarked on a successful co-headlining tour with DROPKICK MURPHYS in 2019, with support from HATEBREED, AMIGO THE DEVIL and Russ Rankin of GOOD RIDDANCE.
Two of the band’s most recent albums, “Earth Rocker” (2013) and “Psychic Warfare” (2015), were included in Classic Rock magazine’s 50 Best Rock Albums of the 2010s.
