Pepper Keenan hasn't grabbed a guitar or stood up to a microphone for Corrosion of Conformity since 2006. Not that he's been slacking, he's primarily been spending his time with Down and owning a sick bar in New Orleans, among other things… but low and behold!

Come early 2015, Corrosion of Conformity is going to be hitting up the studio with Keenan for a new record! I'll let that sink in for a minute and then we'll get down to the details via an interview with drummer Reed Mullin.

Deep breath!

"It’s a mixture of both. Pepper and I were talking the other day, and we’ve got some riffs left over from that era that I never used for COC stuff, and he didn’t use for Down. They’ve just been sitting around from when we used to do demos at Jag Studios. He was like, 'Man, I found a couple cassettes. Remember those cassettes we used to do with [John] Custer down at Jag?' So yeah, he found a cache of some good riffage in his house down there in New Orleans that I guess he had packed away.

And for some reason, I can remember a lot of the riffs those guys write. Like, there’s a song on the new COC album, the three-piece, and the music is music Pepper and I had jammed back in 1989, and I ended up just putting lyrics to it. Me, Woody and Mike recorded it. It’s called 'Tarquinius Superbus,' after the last Roman king. For some reason, I remember a lot of the stuff they do, so I’m kind of like an encyclopedia of a lot of their riffs."