Mudhoney's bass man at the centre of COVID response

The last few years only made it crazier.

Outside of slapping the strings with Mudhoney, Maddison is a registered nurse, and held a day job at Seattle's Harborview Medical Centre in Washington in the US - the state's main hospital - when the pandemic hit.

"My last job there was in the anaesthesia department, preparing people for surgery. Of course, the great majority of surgeries in a hospital are elective, and as soon as the pandemic hit, we stopped doing anything that was elective.

"I got reassigned to a COVID position where I was going around testing patients, and that sort of thing."

Maddison wrote a journal during his experience on the frontline of the COVID response, and he's since turned it into a podcast, Emergency Room: The Covid Diaries, where he tells the story of the outbreak from his perspective.

"I worked the night shift, and it was so weird. The whole of Seattle was completely shut down, there was no one on the streets. You didn't even see the homeless.

"It was kind of like a ghost town. It'd ride to work on my bike, and you'd hardly see another person in the five miles between my house and the hospital."

His role at the hospital meant that he isolated himself almost entirely from the world. Barely seeing his family and sleeping in the basement of his house until vaccines came out. It also meant he couldn't see his bandmates for more than a year. In true Mudhoney fashion, even that was unusual.

Seattle Public Utilities was digging a sewerage tunnel, and needed a name for the machine that would dig it.

"There was a competition to name it, and we utilised a fair bit of social media to get our name on the side of the machine."

The votes weren't even close, and the group re-united at the christening of MudHoney, the tunnel boring machine.

Having been isolated for so long, Maddison said each member of the band had been busy writing. When they finally got back in the practice studio - frontman Mark Arm's basement - it all came rushing out.

"We all got back together and it turned out that we had a lot of ideas, being locked up in our houses, and playing at home in our basements.

"We weren't really playing for that second year, there were no gigs, so we just started meeting and practicing, and fleshing out these songs."

That pent up creativity has emerged as a new album, Plastic Eternity.

Two singles have already been released, with Move Under and Almost Everything providing a familiar sound in preview to an album rich with funky experimentation.

"It will probably be surprising, some of the tunes on there. But I think there's plenty of stuff that hits that sweet spot of fuzz guitar, sixties overdriven punk music that Mudhoney's known for."

Maddison said the composition of some of the more "out there" tracks is owed to the pandemic changing their process.

Usually they would jam through the new songs while practicing for upcoming shows. But with no shows, and little time to work things out at practice, Maddison said a lot of the songs were pieced together in the recording studio.

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"This time we definitely did some things we hadn't done before, like Flush The Fascists, where we used a synthesizer loop as the backing track, and played over that.

"We were pretty free to indulge everything we wanted in the creation of these songs. Maybe that's why they're a little different."

So many new ideas came out of the pandemic that Mudhoney are planning to follow up the release of Plastic Eternity with an EP. Just as they did with 2013 release Vanishing Point and follow up EP Morning In America.

Many of those ideas about the pandemic, and people's behaviour during, are laid out in Arm's lyrics. The treatment of essential workers is a central theme in track eight, Human Stock Capital, with Arm singing "You're nothing special, but you're essential to the bottom line."

"Undoubtedly there are some lyrics on the record that directly speak to what happened during the pandemic. Mark writes a lot of politically satirical lyrics, and he always has," Maddison said.

"He rightly picks out some of the people who need to be held responsible for what they did."

Mudhoney's upcoming Australian tour will be the first time the new tunes are played live. It'll also be the first time since the last Big Day Out in 2014 that Maddison will get to play in front of a home crowd.

They featured on a huge lineup which was headlined by grunge icons Pearl Jam, and included Australian pub rockers Cosmic Psychos, who had their own place in the foundation of the Seattle sound.

"I remember us and the Psychos might have had a few too many beers, and there was some hijinks afterwards," Maddison said.

Having been couped up in Seattle for the duration of the pandemic, and now living in Melbourne, Maddison said he's looking forward to coming home.

"It'll be great to get back. My family still lives there so I'll get to see my mum, and a lot of old friends from back in the day."

Plastic Eternity comes out on April 7.

For all the Australian tour dates click here.