So, has your tour started yet? Gearing up. I haven’t been out for a couple months because I had a real strong run for a minute where I was jumping back and forth between Sleep and High on Fire and didn’t take time off for a while. I begged for mercy and took like a month and a half off.

A month and a half? That’s like retirement for you. (Laughs) Yeah, but you gotta every once in a while.

I saw a couple pictures on your Facebook showing you guys working on a new album. Yeah, the music is done. We just need the artwork and a layout. It should be coming out in the summertime.

Will you be performing any of those songs on this tour? Yeah. We don’t want to play the whole thing—that’d be pretty scary—but you want to get ’em excited and throw one or two in there.

Your drummer said those wanting a taste of the new album should, “Take some mescaline [and] listen to Side B of [Black] Sabbath’s Master of Reality backwards on 78 rpm.” Yeah, it’s pretty f*cking awesome, man. I really like what we did on this one. But I didn’t need mescaline when I was writing a bunch of it (laughs). Aside from pot I was like 99 percent sober, and it really turned out awesome.

Being a three-piece isn’t super-rare for a metal band, but four or five members is definitely the standard. What do you like about being just a trio? The three of us are really good at making a big wall of sound, and I’ve just never really needed another guitar player, to be honest. I just do my thing and know how to put it together, and I have the best rhythm section ever to back me up. You get a little more room to explore and to improv, and you make more money at the end of the day (laughs).

Like many metal acts, you get compared to Black Sabbath a lot, but it seems like you try to balance those homages to favorite acts while still pushing the genre forward. I think we take a lot of our influences, but really at the root of all things is Tony Iommi’s guitar playing for me. I mean, Sabbath as a whole for me.

There are a lot of other influence, from what we grew up on in the punk rock, hardcore scene and the crossover with metal. I lived through, well, it was more than the ’70s—one, two, three, four, now it’s like a fifth generation of music—and now we’re still trying to keep it as organic and as old-school as we can but still creatively layer things so that it is our way of doing it. It’s been experimented out enough to where we’re making advancements and breakthroughs in sound.

You mentioned being part of the fifth generation of metal. I know you guys have reached more of a top tier than most bands, but what is the state of metal that you see traveling across the country? I think metal got really bad for a while, when people started to mix rap with it and do all these other combinations and not exploring it to explore it as metal. Instead of moving forward, they digressed for a while. So the ’90s didn’t have a whole lot to offer.

Then some people started getting a f*cking clue, and some better bands started coming out of it again. I think we’re at least on the right path to doing something great and actually having a voice and not doing what you would expect. Metal became this thing where you knew what it was gonna sound like before you even put on the new album, like there was this standard that everyone was supposed to sound like and play like. I never really fell into that.

I think metal fans have also become a little more open-minded about what metal can be and what the music can do—more than just super-fast double kick and five minute solos, I think there’s more acceptance of experimentation, which is really how the genre started in the first place. Absolutely. What it boils down to at the end of the day is good songwriting. If your song sucks but you have a killer shred solo, who gives a f*ck?

What’s the current state of Sleep? You guys have been doing some reunion shows here and there. We just hang out and jam and try to keep the fans of that band with something to look forward to, and we have a lot of fun doing it. We can make a little dough on the side, and all of us have full-time bands, too, but we love it. Sleep is a lot of fun to perform.

I know everybody wants to talk about a new album, but when it comes it’s just gonna show up one day. I don’t want to put a big word of mouth out there or anything. We’re just trying to play great shows right now.

Is it wild to you that it’s been this many years since Sleep ended and you’re still so popular? It’s a f*cking anomaly dude. How big that f*cking band is is an anomaly. It’s just like, wow, we really lucked out that that many people, while we were missing from the Earth, picked it up.

And a whole subgenre kinda formed around it as you guys were exiting the scene. Yeah, I have no explanation for all that. It’s weird but very fortunate for me.