Drummer Tomas Haake and guitarist Mårten Hagström from Swedish math-metal kings MESHUGGAH spoke to BW&BK; today (January 12th) just prior to an exclusive listening session of their new album, obZen, in Los Angeles, CA. Here are a few excerpts from the chat:

What is the significance of the title?

Haake: "obZen is basically a play of the words obscene and the Zen you find in the artwork. And it's kind of tied together lyrically on the album. It's a broad expression of what the lyrics are kind of about. It doesn't have anything to do with the Buddhist religion, it's a strong metaphor for the human being finding balance and harmony in bloodshed. It's not really a conceptual piece, but there's kind of a red line going through the lyrics."

Describe the musical direction of obZen.

Haake: "The album is pretty direct compared to our recent releases. It's a pretty diverse album. It's more of a live-related type of album. It has more typical song-lengths and song-structures. There's a bunch of different tempos throughout the album. It's much different than Catch Thirty Three that was more of an experimental album."

Hagström: "It has some aspects to it that are easy to identify. Something we wanted was it to be more live and be more of a dynamic album so you could actually distinguish every song. It's as linear as Nothing was. That's something we aimed for and I think we accomplished it. That's what appealed to us when we wrote the album - to have different faces to each song. A lot of people who liked Chaosphere will relate to the intensity of this album. We have all the elements down - to a certain extent this new album has pieces of all our albums. It takes those tools and does something new with them. It's a snapshot of the past but in a new setting of where we are today."

How long did it take to write the album?

Haake: "The writing overall took about a year and a lot of changes in the songs and reconstructing before we even started tracking drums. This time we spent more time in the studio than we've ever done before with each and every instrument. I spent almost a full month on the drums and then half of the time was spent playing it, choosing takes and editing and putting it into an actual track. There was a lot of puzzling to get that done. All in all we spent like six months recording it and mixing."

Talk about 'Bleed' - the first song that will be presented to the world tomorrow by Indie 103.1 FM's Chaos With Full Metal Jackie program and on BraveTunes at BraveWords.com next week.

Haake: "That one was a bit awkward recording, not only because of the length but because the pattern I'm playing is hard - the kick-drums on that song is something we've never done before. I spent a lot of time practising that one. I probably practised that more than all of the other tracks together just because I had to figure out an entirely different approach to playing the bass drums. It's very direct and super-hard to play, but it's still pretty straight-forward. You can't get too catchy with Meshuggah, but in a sense it's a bit catchy."

Hagström: "Everything to us is an experiment all the time. It's very much typical of the album, even though it doesn't sound like any other song on the album. The method of it is building from something the ear can recognize, with the tools that we use and that metal uses all the time, but we're presenting it in a different manner. But the tools themselves are easy to recognize. But that's true with all the songs."

ObZen is scheduled for release in North America on March 11th. The follow-up to 2005's Catch Thirty Three will contain nine songs and will have a running time of around 55 minutes. The tracklisting for obZen is as follows: 'Combustion', 'Electric Red', 'Bleed', 'Lethargica', 'ObZen', 'This Spiteful Snake', 'Pineal Gland Optics', 'Pravus', 'Dancers To A Discordant System'.