When asked about the sound of MASTODON's forthcoming album, drummer Brann Dailor told the German edition of Metal Hammer magazine, "When you listen to the songs, they don't sound as 'fun' as we perceive them to be, I guess; it's still pretty extremely heavy material." He added, "We had a few songs that were kind of, not left over from 'Crack The Skye', but just stuff that we wanted to be on that album, but that album kind of took on a whole different thing of its own and there were a few stragglers that were super-heavy and crazy that didn't make it, and we finally got to put them on this record. And then we wrote a whole bunch of brand new stuff. There's, like, 14 songs that we recorded. And it's sort all over the place - a lot of different sounds. Some straight-up classic-rock-sounding songs, straight-up death metal-sounding songs and some completely bizarre, weirdo rock songs that we're not really sure what they are, but we love them."