(Photo courtesy of Alex Gibbs.)

Recently I was given the opportunity to chat with O’Brother on their Cincinnati tour date, opening up for Chevelle. They’ve been working on the follow-up to 2013’s Disillusion, and quite a bit of progress has been made. In fact, new O’Brother could be in your ears by the beginning of 2016.

TUNED UP: You guys have been working on your third full-length quite a bit lately. How has that process been, and what can the listeners expect from it?

O’Brother: Yeah, we just finished up the new record not too long ago actually. In fact, it’s being mixed right now. Musically, it’s substantially more minimalistic than our last two records. It felt good to strip things down a little bit. Don’t get me wrong, it’s still heavy and orchestral like O’Brother has always been, but it’s also different for us. I think every song has a section where only one of us is playing, so that’s pretty cool, and I’m sure the finished product will sound cool too. Right now we’re looking at a release sometime early next year.

While there hasn’t been much touring going on lately, you have been playing a few shows here and there, including a couple of Ohio dates with Chevelle.

Yeah, and that’s the gist of what’s been happening tour-wise with us as of late. We played a headlining show up in Lansing, and then we had a few other spot dates, all three with Chevelle. Here is our dilemma: while we obviously want to play music – after all, that’s why we started O’Brother in the first place – we don’t want to get too busy in the meantime. We just finished a record, and we’d love to still be in the studio while it’s being mixed. Maybe we should still be in the studio? Haha… the bottom line is that we wouldn’t want to overdo it. That’s especially true now that not all of us are in the same area – Anton lives in Chicago. You can imagine how that went trying to coordinate all of our schedules in order to find time to record this new album.

For sure, and oddly enough, that’s the perfect Segway into my next question. Though some of you don’t live there anymore, Atlanta is still where the band was formed. Talk to me a little bit about the local music scene in Atlanta. TUNED UP is all about our own local scene here in Columbus. My question for you is: how does your local scene in Atlanta impact you as artists? Similarly, what drives you artistically?

In terms of influences, we aren’t really influenced by our own scene. Instead, we’re more likely to be influenced by bands we’ve grown up with, films, movie scores, and just art in general. As a band, we can do something as simple as watching a movie together and be inspired by it. There are some really cool movie scores we’ve come across that have inspired us. Another aspect of our lives that has influenced us as a band is having been raised in the South. Our upbringing still influences us as people to this day, I think particularly in how we interact with our fans. It’s this whole concept of “Southern hospitality” that we feel we should practice as a band.

In regards to the actual scene, there’s always so much going on in Atlanta, which can be a good thing and a bad thing. For fans, it’s cool because you can find a good show every night. As a band though, it’s tough to get yourselves out there for that exact same reason. There also seem to be a lot of folks that are burnt out, which has the potential to affect our own morale as well. That said, we couldn’t see ourselves anywhere else. We love Atlanta even in its flaws, and are proud to call it our hometown.

Thanks to O’Brother for taking the time to (albeit briefly) chat with us, and keep an eye out for new music from the Atlanta natives, slated for release early next year. Stay up to date on the band’s Facebook page.