Look for a hard-hitting new effort from Maryland rockers Clutch in the New York.

The quartet has finished work on its 10th album, "Earth Rocker," which is due out in the spring, and bassist Dan Maines tells us that the follow-up to 2009's "Strange Cousins From the West" it will be filled with "very concise, heavy songs."

We didn't want to go out on too many tangents on this one and just kept the songs...I don't want to say simple, but maybe a little bit more straightforward and just very upbeat, tempo-wise.

I'd say a lot of these songs are some of the fastest songs we've written. We wanted to make sure (the album) has a good, high energy that maintains itself throughout the whole record. Just listening to the basic stuff we did, everything sounds great. I'm really excited."

Clutch recorded the album with producer Machine and will release it on the band's own Weathermaker Records imprint.

Clutch has been playing some of the songs, including "Crucial Velocity" and "The Wolfman is Coming Out," which was previously known as "Newt," on stage during the past couple of years, and Maines predicts that the group will be playing even more of them on upcoming dates -- which start Wednesday (October 31) in Flint, Michigan.

"We're not afraid to play any of these songs before the record actually comes out -- we actually kind of prefer that," Maines says.

"That's what we enjoy playing, is the new stuff. So I would say with certainly that we're gonna play at least a handful of the songs off the new album at these shows."

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