John Baizley is knee deep in the recording studio. The lead singer, guitarist and visual artist for the proggy, sludgy metal quartet Baroness has been working on the band’s latest album, and fans of the group will be pleased to hear it’s almost a wrap and ready to hit the road.

“It’s going great,” Baizley says enthusiastically of the as yet unnamed album set for fall release. “Our drummer and bass player, Allen [Blickle] and Summer [Welch], have finished all of their commitments to the record, and those guys are back home right now with their girlfriends and their nice, comfortable rooms. It’s just [guitarist] Pete Adams and I here for the next week and a half, two weeks to finish up.”

The band’s first full-length, 2007′s “Red Album” [Relapse Records], was largely written as the band jammed things out. This time around, the experimental metallers took a new path, especially considering Adams is from Virginia and Blickle lives in Brooklyn.

“It’s not like we get together and it just happens three or four nights a week, every week, all year round. We have to organize things, and what we did with this record is Pete basically came down and lived with me for a couple months and he and I woke up at the crack of dawn every day, drank two pots of coffee, and immersed ourselves in our instruments and let every idea that could possible come out, come out,” Baizley explains. “We went through them, and were analytical and critical. We gauged our emotional responses to what we were doing. After a couple months, we had just compiled this wealth of scatterbrained material, and when the other guys joined, and were able to give input, these things sort of fleshed out.”

The songs originally started out as “wildly reaching concepts and ideas that we thought were interesting, and things that met the requirements of us.”

They gradually refined these concepts into songs, “and that’s the way this one has gone, which is completely different from the last record.”

According to Baizley, his own musical bond with fellow guitarist Adams – and latest member of the band – goes beyond simply playing and writing tunes for Baroness.

“Pete’s been in the band for maybe eight months, but he’s the first dude I ever sat down and played guitar with,” Baizley says, noting he was probably about 13 at the time.

“We discovered punk rock together; we discovered heavy metal together. In my formative musical years, it was Pete and I in the basement of my house just experimenting, plugging into different things, trying to push ourselves. And here we are 20 years down the road; we’ve reconnected. That bond that we had in our seminal guitar learning days is still intact and it definitely plays itself out on stage in a way that I find incredible powerful,” Baizley adds.

The band is taking that energy back out onto the road this summer in a supporting slot for Maryland rockers Clutch, and after a successful series of support tours last year, and what was only the beginning of their meteoric musical rise, they’ve got their touring chops set to high gear.

“Last year, we did a number of fairly sizable tours as support bands. It was definitely a kick in the pants from the onset to jump from the 300 to 500 hundred realm of clubs straight to the 2,000 to 3,000. And it’s great for us to share the stage with accomplished musicians. It’s what drives us.”

Having played music as a band for seven years, and an average 250 gigs a year, “we’ve been around the block,” Baizley offers.

“However, many shows we’ve done, at the end of the day, genre, relative band size, popularity aside, it’s just refreshing to play with musicians who have their proverbial shit together, because it challenges us. It sets the bar higher. Without that challenge, without that fear and anticipation of just totally being blown out of the water every night, we’ve got nothing.”

Baizley describes the overall Baroness experience as “the best case scenario, and this happens frequently enough that this is something that we can strive for, is that sort of unique moment when I lose track of the fact that I’m on a stage and that you as an audience member are on the ground, and we’re able to get that sort of electric connection that I think is unique in music to actually seeing a band that transcends the album experience. There are moments where we’re playing and the reality of the situation is lost on me, and what it becomes is basically me being a 14-year old kid again, seeing the first best show of my life.”