Brann Dailor says Mastodon began recording Marrow Deep a week after Brent Hinds died, and nearly decided against going in.
Mastodon had studio time booked for September 2025. Brent Hinds died on August 20 that year. The band went in anyway, roughly a week later, and were not certain it was the right call.
Speaking on SiriusXM‘s “Trunk Nation With Eddie Trunk” on August 6, drummer Brann Dailor, bassist Troy Sanders and guitarist Bill Kelliher described how two deaths shaped Marrow Deep, which arrives on August 28 through Loma Vista Recordings.
Dailor began by making clear what the record cost them. He said: (as transcribed by Blabbermouth):
“Obviously we didn’t want the album to be about what it’s about, and we would take all the songs and all the lyrics back if we could have our people back, but that’s not the situation.”
He then traced the sequence of events across roughly eighteen months.
“We started really writing for this record maybe a couple of years ago, and then we interrupted that writing to go on the ‘Leviathan‘ [20th-]anniversary tour [of Mastodon‘s sophomore album] with Lamb Of God around the States,” Dailor explained. “And around the end of that tour, we decided, ‘Okay, we’re gonna hunker down and really start writing.’ And that’s where we experienced some turmoil with our brother Brent, and I, unfortunately, lost my mother. And we were kind of working away on stuff, and it was tough. Then we went to Europe for a summer tour. We were diligently working on the material, getting it ready to go into the studio in September [of 2025], and unfortunately, another tragedy — we lost Brent at the end of August. But we still had to go into the studio in about a week after losing Brent and kind of thought that maybe it was not the best idea. We weren’t sure, but it ended up being exactly what we needed to kind of go in there and lean on each other and just dig in on these songs and put every little bit of all of these couple of tragedies that, unfortunately, visited us into the music, into the lyrics, into everything about it, and to just power through and, like I said, lean on each other to get through and come out the other side with this album that we’re all very proud of but is very emotional for us.”
Hinds was dismissed from Mastodon in March 2025 and died five months later in a motorcycle accident in Atlanta at the age of 51. Dailor‘s mother, Michele Lawrence, had died that February.
Dailor also confirmed that nothing Hinds wrote appears on the record, and explained why.
He said: “Unfortunately not. Really, for the last few records, we would try to get him to come down and contribute, but he was just kind of off doing his thing. He was riding his motorcycle around. But we would always keep writing, and we would text him or I’d call him and say, ‘Hey, we’re gonna be down there at the space. We’re gonna be writing. So, just letting you know. And if you wanna get down there with us and get your hands dirty, you’re more than welcome. We want you to be more involved.’ But he had a lot going on in his life as well, and he was going through some things personally that were tough, and so we understood that, and we were just giving him as much grace as we could and just always leaving the door open. But also, we are three creative people that the faucet just doesn’t turn off, and so we just wanted to be, like, ‘Hey, man, we’re gonna keep on writing, and we’re very excited for you to get in on this stuff,’ and always left that door open. But, unfortunately, for the last bunch of months of touring and while we were working on the skeletons of the songs that became Marrow Deep, he just was kind of nowhere to be found within those writing sessions. And as a result, we don’t have any material from him that is on the new record. So it’s solely the three of us kind of creating everything from the ground up, and then getting the new members involved towards the end to sort of, quote-unquote, ‘punch up’ the songs that existed and really get them to be as good as they possibly could be with some fresh and new energy with João and Nick Johnston on guitar.”
This is the second time in a row the band has built an album around a death. 2021’s Hushed And Grim followed the loss of longtime manager and friend Nick John, who died of pancreatic cancer in September 2018. Sanders, who writes lyrics with Dailor, said the practice goes back to Crack The Skye.
“One thing that we did early in our career when we wrote Crack The Skye is — both Brann and myself, who are now the co-lyricists of the band, and we collaborate to write lyrics — since Crack The Skye, it’s been therapeutic and very helpful when we can channel all the things happening in our real life to the lyrics. We try to draw stories around them. But to channel this authentic sadness of the real-life situations that we’re going through, it makes sense to us. It’s helpful to us. And on the flip side, it’s very relatable to anyone that cares to listen, because we’re just human. We’re not bigger or better than anyone else. And when we turn these dark, tragic things lyrically into something that we hope to be bright and beautiful that lives forever, that’s an achievement that we’re shooting for,” Sanders said.
He was candid about his own state while writing.
“So we’ve been not shying away from doing that, from a lyrical standpoint,” he continued. “And for this record especially, Marrow Deep, I didn’t know where my head and brain and heart were, and I don’t know about Brann — I think he was in a similar situation; we were just kind of lost in this — but it was very, very, very helpful for me to process all this information, putting my heart to my pen, pen to paper, and then that paper through the microphone when we’re demoing vocals and actually tracking the record. So, yes, it was dark. It was shrouded with sadness. But now that it’s been months since we finished the record and it’s about to come out, I listen to it with a lot of pride, feeling that it was very successful personally and with my bandmates. So, yeah, it’s bizarre that we do this quite often, but I find it to be pretty powerful and very, very, very helpful.”
Kelliher writes riffs rather than words, but said some were written with Dailor‘s mother in mind.
“It would be a disservice to our fallen family members, friends, to Brent, to Michele, if we didn’t make the album a tribute to them,” Kelliher said. “It’s cathartic in a way.”
He has been here before. Kelliher wrote parts of 2017’s Emperor Of Sand at his own mother’s deathbed, and still associates specific passages with her.
Kelliher continued: “I lost my mom during Emperor Of Sand, and that was… When I write riffs, for instance, like ‘Roots Remain‘, I put my heart and soul into the choice notes that I pick and I play, because every time I play those riffs and those songs, it brings me to think of her. And it’s the same with every album. Each album and song is a moment in time, a snapshot of where we are. And I just try to facilitate that in my songwriting, as far as the riffs and the rhythms and the overall feel of everything, and then peppered in with when Brann and I and Troy, on the last few records, really dial it in. It becomes this, in my mind, a masterpiece, and this record is no different. We have to talk about what’s happening in our lives. You gotta get off your chest and honor these tragedies. And with Nick John, there’s no way we could have made a record and not mentioned him. That’s all we were thinking about. I mean, he was one of my closest friends in the world. I feel like every record — we’re getting older, and it’s, like, man, we’re turning into this kind of grief-stricken band, but at the same time, on the good side of it, the upside, it’s what our fans kind of expect. ‘Cause I read a lot of the responses, the message boards, when people are, like, ‘Man, now I feel what you meant when you guys sang this in Crack The Skye or the riff in this song, and it really brings tears to my eyes. I’m, like, ‘Jesus, man, you understand. You got it.’ And it’s therapeutic. It’s like medicine. So this album, I’m so proud of it, all the work that we put into it and the years of writing. ‘Cause when I first put it all together, I’m, like, man, ‘Is this any good? It all sounds like one big homogenous blob right now.’ But then I bring it to the other guys, and we all chip away at it, and all the lyrics and everything are on there, and then the subject matter, all of a sudden, it was like a right-hand turn. It was just, like, ‘Whoa, man.’ We just lost Michele, and now we’ve lost Brent… Brent had just left the band, and it was just, like, all these crazy things going on.”
Marrow Deep is Mastodon‘s ninth studio album and their first in five years. It runs to twelve tracks, takes its themes from the Three Fates of Greek mythology, and was co-produced by the band at their own West End Sound in Atlanta with Patrik Berger and Kurt Ballou, then mixed by Andrew Scheps.
It is also the first Mastodon album made as a five-piece, with Canadian guitarist Nick Johnston and keyboardist João Nogueira of The Claypool Lennon Delirium joining the three founders. Johnston had been playing live with the band since spring 2025, after Ben Eller stepped in at “Tool In The Sand” that March.
Second single “Snakes For Dinner“ features Josh Homme of Queens Of The Stone Age, his first appearance on a Mastodon record since “Colony Of Birchmen” on 2006’s Blood Mountain. It followed “Your Ghost Again“, which the band debuted live with a dedication to Hinds and which placed second in a Revolver readers’ poll of the year’s best songs so far.
The three founding members spoke about Hinds at length in the documentary “The Mastodon In The Room“, saying they wanted supporters to hear their account after the speculation that followed his death.
Mastodon take the album out on “The Poisonous Weapons Tour“, opening September 16 in Orlando and closing October 24 at Sick New World Dallas, with Deafheaven and Alcest supporting throughout.
