Ultimate Guitar recently caught up with MACHINE HEAD guitarist Phil Demmel to discuss the band's forthcoming album, The Blackening. The following is a brief excerpt:

Ultimate Guitar: After everything the band has been through over the years, did you approach songwriting differently on The Blackening?

Phil: "I think we kind of carried over a lot of the same process that we did on the last album, as far as the writing for ourselves. We write for ourselves and that’s what our fans like. So we stayed with that formula with this. This will be the first time that I was with band from the beginning as far as the writing process is concerned. I joined on the last album and only helped write three songs. They had pretty much 95 percent of the album already written.

So with this one, I was involved in the beginning. Rob (Flynn, vocals/guitar) and I really had a chance to kind of go back to a little bit of our history in the early 80’s thrash stage. There’s a lot of fast riffing, kind of intricate, technical stuff. We kind of wanted to push ourselves. Everybody in the band, we just kind of wanted to push ourselves musically. So what can you expect from The Blackening? Long songs! A couple 10-minute songs, a couple 8-minutes songs. Just really the most intricate and most technical Machine Head record to date."

Ultimate Guitar: Talk a little about those 10-minute songs. What are they called and what was the process behind those in comparison with the other tracks?

Demmel: "The opener is called 'Clenching The Fists Of Dissent'. It’s basically 10 minutes because there’s kind of an intro at the beginning. What basically started with the song is Dave (McClain, drums) coming up with something. We had like a middle section and it was really rocking kind of double-bass, a cool breakdown. Rob is really good at melodic little breakdowns. As we add the intro to it and the stomping, moshing metal part to it, the songs just tend to grow. We end up adding riffs to it that we don’t want to lose. It’s just like, 'Why? Why do we have to take it out?' We’re not a radio-driven band. It’s just like, 'Man, we like it. That’s all that matters. Let’s keep it in.'"

Go to this location to read the entire interview.