Tesseract are planning to launch material later this year to coincide with their appearance at the Download festival.

They released third album Polaris in September last year – but guitarist James Monteith reveals they haven’t stopped since, and are currently sifting through a “mountain of ideas” for a future album. But he hints they could have material out before then in the shape of “re-workings.”

He tells TeamRock Radio presenter Pete Bailey’s The Playlist podcast: “Ideas for album four are very much under way – there’s actually a couple of songs written already and a mountain of ideas that need to be sorted out.

“We’ll probably have another release later this year – not an album but something else – maybe some re-workings. We’re playing with some ideas and we’ll definitely put something out for the summer because we’re playing Download.”

The band have been labelled under the djent banner – a spinoff genre of progressive metal. But Monteith says it’s not a term he now associates with the band.

He continues: “In terms of musicians and friends, nobody ever uses the word ‘djent.’ It was a word used by other people. I had almost forgotten about its existence.

“The bands that were around five, six, seven years ago when this whole djent thing started have definitely moved on, but people still call the collective bands under that banner because it’s an easy way to group sounds.”

Monteith adds: “Tesseract’s sound has definitely evolved in terms of songwriting and it’s definitely headed down more of a prog route.”

The band head out on a UK tour later this week with Nordic Giants and The Contortionist in support of Polaris – Tesseract’s first release since the return of vocalist Dan Tompkins, who’d been replaced by Ashe O’Hara for 2013’s Altered State.

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