In the Book of Exodus, what plague came after hail and before darkness? Locusts! The heavy metal quartet known as Machine Head will soon swarm into Columbus playing material of the band’s latest album “Unto the Locust.”

Drummer Dave McClain took some time to tell UWeekly about the recording of the new album, what fans can expect from their upcoming show, and the immortal Dimebag Darrell:

UW: What did the band want from this new album on the heels of the success of “The Blackening?”

We didn’t want to write “The Blackening” again. At that point, we were just so…from touring “The Blackening” for three years … we were just ready to get home, not that we were tired of touring or anything, but we were just kinda ready to close the door on “The Blackening” and get on with new stuff. We took a little bit of time off, a couple months, and then got back into it. We didn’t know where the record was gonna go. We’d all been writing separately, so we didn’t really have like one vision of where we were going and we never really do. Me and Robb (Flynn, lead vocals/guitar) got together first and he had the song “This is the End” and it started off completely different than anything that we were doing before with “Through the Ashes” or “The Blackening.” It started off with this classical stuff … super hard, super thrashy, and kinda blast beat stuff going on. So it’s cool, you know, just getting into that writing process with something completely different than what we’ve done.

UW: “Unto the Locust” has some pretty striking artwork. How was the art/artist selected?

Originally we kinda wanted to do something that was kinda similar to Van Halen’s “Fair Warning” or Slayer’s “Reign in Blood,” that kind of weird art, you know? We just started looking at all this stuff and I think Robb just sort of stumbled upon this guy (Paul Gerrard) and he had some really cool stuff. It turned out that he was in college and stuff, and he used to listen to Machine Head a lot, so he was just pretty excited to do it.

UW: I know the band was close with Dimebag Darrell, do you have a particularly fond memory of him to share?

Nobody was safe from Dime, you know? laughs One time he grabbed one of Robb’s guitars and went up on stage, just jumping around with it and knocked one of the tuning pegs off. And Robb was like, “Dude, you f*cked up one of my guitars.” So, two shows later, Dime comes up in the middle of the show … interrupts the show and gets on the mic and basically tells the story and says, “I wanna apologize to Robb …” and for that he brought out these two guitars and gave one to Robb and one to Logan (Mader, guitar 1992-98). Gave ‘em two Dimebag guitars, you know … amazing dude. Just the best. For that to have happened to that guy, not that it’s right for that to happen to anybody, but Dimebag … he was just this iconic figure in metal. We refuse to even think about playing the Alrosa Villa since that happened. For us … man, I get like crazy emotional just thinking about walking into that … I can still picture that place. There’s no way that any of us would be able to have a decent show being on the stage where this amazing dude died, you know?

UW: Is there a new song that you are particularly enjoying to play live?

Uh, yeah, a lot of them actually. We open up with “I Am Hell” and it’s just insane right off the bat. Just full blast. Yeah, we’re almost playing the whole record except “Pearls Before the Swine” … the cool thing about the record is that I think like every song is kind of different in its own way, so going from a song like “I Am Hell” to like “Be Still and Know” … they’re all just so different. Maybe it’s just that we’re not sick of playing them yet. I don’t know. laughs

Machine Head will be performing at the Newport Music Hall on Tuesday, Jan. 24. Doors open at 6 p.m. Tickets $18 advance/$20 day of show. Suicide Silence and Darkest Hour support. For more information, please visit www.machinehead1.com or www.promowestlive.com.