Clutch have released ‘Beware the Fever’ and announced their Give the People What They Want tour for 2027. The single brings a banjo onto a Clutch record for the first time. It will appear on Wasted Lands, due January 22 through Weathermaker Music, alongside the earlier previews ‘The Drifter Returns’ and the title track.

The four members of Clutch in a black and white promotional portrait
Clutch. Promotional photograph by Dan Winters.

The part heard on the record dates back to January 2026. Neil Fallon was trying melodies on a Deering Goodtime banjo at the Doom Saloon, the band’s base in Frederick, Maryland. Jean-Paul Gaster added a beat; Fallon followed with electric guitar and bass. Gaster remembers that instrumental taking less than twenty minutes. He then kept listening to it while waiting to hear what Fallon might sing. The lyrics arrived months later, in preproduction with Machine.

That leaves two different clocks behind the song: the short afternoon when its music took shape, and the months before words were added. The banjo from the first demo remains on the album. For listeners following Clutch’s recording process, it is a specific example of an early performance being kept. A quickly assembled instrumental and a quickly finished record are different things, as Gaster’s account makes clear.

Wasted Lands is their fourteenth studio album, following 2022’s Sunrise on Slaughter Beach. It also reunites them with Machine, who last worked with the band on 2015’s Psychic Warfare. The twelve-track list places the three available previews at numbers one, six and eleven. They are five positions apart, giving listeners points near the beginning, middle and end without revealing the whole sequence. Most of that sequence still awaits the January release.

The album arrives just before Clutch’s Australian dates: Fremantle is first on January 23. There is a longer interval before Honolulu on February 5, fourteen days after release, and Green Bay on February 27, thirty-six days after it. The tour then reaches Cleveland the next night. Corrosion of Conformity, Agnostic Front and Chuck Ragan are announced as guests for the headline run; Honolulu lists local support. Brooklyn Steel closes the announced route on April 4.

Public ticket sales begin November 13 at 10:00 local venue time. The Las Vegas listing gives a concrete example: 10:00 Pacific for its March 19 show is 21:00 in Istanbul that Friday. Presales there end at 22:00 Pacific on November 12. Those shopping for a show in another time zone will have a different opening to follow. For the music itself, the next shared date is January 22, when the full album joins the three previews already available.