Sitting down with Germany’s Visions magazine, Mastodon‘s Brann Dailor (drums, vocals) and Bill Kelliher (rhythm guitar, backing vocals) opened up about the band’s first record in half a decade — and the first they have made since founding guitarist Brent Hinds left the group and, months later, died.
That album, Marrow Deep, lands August 28 through Loma Vista Recordings. It is the follow-up to 2021’s Hushed And Grim and finds founding members Dailor, Kelliher and bassist/vocalist Troy Sanders pouring years of hard living and loss into a set of songs. The record takes its cue from the Three Fates of Greek mythology and the thin threads that hold together life, loss and fate, and the band says it pushed them into some of the boldest and most feeling-heavy music they have ever put to tape.
Asked what it has been like to play without Hinds since his exit and, roughly a year ago, his death, Kelliher reflected on the decades the two spent side by side (as transcribed by Blabbermouth):
“When you’re in a band with other guys, which becomes a business, which becomes the focus of your life, and everybody’s working so hard, and you’re traveling so much together in tight spots for 25, 26 years of that, going through the ups and the downs of just being friends, just being in a band that even has lasted that long. Most bands don’t make it half that, a quarter of that. But it was definitely difficult to not see him over there… And it’s just, like, ‘Okay, this is is different now.’ But it’s a necessary… It’s just that’s the way it is. He’s not there. But I do see him. It’s weird. For a split millisecond, I’ll see the back of someone’s hair or some tattoo something. It reminds me of seeing him. So it’s gonna take a while.”
Dailor picked up the thread:
“I think most people, if you existed in close quarters with somebody for many, many years, and they pass, you see them out of the corner of your eye. Your eye plays tricks on you, and for a second, you go, ‘Oh,’ and then you remember that they’re gone. And it’s a bummer for sure because we had some turmoil before he passed, and so it’s the worst-case scenario, really. Because I think that all of us really thought that ‘[We’ll] take a breather here, and at some point down the road, we’ll get back together. And I don’t know if we’re gonna play together, but we’re gonna talk. We’re gonna hash this out and squash everything.'”
He went on:
“We’re brothers. We’re family. It’s 26 years of touring the world, playing all over the place, living in a bus with each other, living in a van with each other. I mean, sleeping on floors, you name it. Every single thing you could go through with another human being… But then you make really incredible art with that person too. So that brings your relationship to another place, when you really create something that you all really, really love, and you go out and play for people.”
For Dailor, playing the old material now feels less like a burden and more like a way to thank his late bandmate:
“I think of him on stage these days or during this tour, not only with the song [‘Your Ghost Again‘] that we’ve been playing off the new album, but songs that he wrote that we’re playing. And I sort of get more overcome with a feeling of gratitude to him… We wrote all these songs together, but there’s stuff like ‘Megalodon‘ or the song ‘Crack The Skye‘, which we’ve put our hearts and souls into those songs together, and he wrote a lot of really incredible riffs. And so the gratitude is to him for creating these things that we get to honor him by playing them and keeping those songs alive and going, which I know that he would’ve wanted that.”
Kelliher felt the same:
“I feel the same way. When we play some of those songs, it’s kind of keeping Brent‘s… This is his art. He created this. And we all created it, but maybe these particular songs are really Brent-tastic. He did most of the writing on that.”
The interviewer pointed out that Dailor in particular had gone out of his way to speak about Hinds‘ death from the stage, sharing a raw moment with the crowd. The drummer explained why he felt he owed the fans that, and how tangled the past year had been for him:
“I felt bad because I know that they were going through it and that they were grieving along with us. And I know that they don’t have the same relationship that we had with him, but I care about the fans, and I think about them. And I felt like we were leaving them hanging. But I also knew that I needed to try to take care of myself as well, and that the three of us needed to sort of grieve as a family, however we could. And the way that we were able to do that is to write this album and get through it. Because it wasn’t just that. My mom also died a few months before Brent, and then we had all that turmoil in between, and it was just like… I had trouble getting out of bed. I was really depressed and was having a hard time, and the only thing I knew how to do was go over to Bill‘s house, write more riffs, go down to the practice space to try to write music to get through it. The only thing that got me through all of it was this new record and Mastodon and just having something that I had to go do. So, get me out of bed and get me going and try to figure it out by writing about it, by singing about it. That’s all I really have to… I don’t go to therapy. Maybe I should. But in the time being, I have Mastodon. And it’s a cliché, but I can’t imagine my life without it. I don’t know what kind of high-strung person, depressed person I would be if I didn’t have Bill and Troy, us to rally around this thing together and get through it. But also in the back of my mind, I was always thinking about the fans and, ‘Man, we need to say something that’s more substantial than a statement on Instagram.’ But I just wasn’t there yet. And so hopefully through the new record and through interviews like this, I guess, they know that I care about all them deeply, and I know that it was a very sad situation for all of them, and it still is, probably. And they’re gonna have a hard time maybe listening to this record, but I just hope that maybe at some point, for some of them, they can, they can do it and they can get through it, and that they find something healing within it.”
Kelliher framed the whole process as a release valve:
“That’s really, to me, what music is — it’s cathartic. And writing it and getting it out, getting it off your chest, ’cause I’m not really good with words, sometimes when I have to talk about my feelings, but I can definitely write a riff. I can put an emotion into it, and Brann can write the lyrics, and he can write riffs, and we can… All of us can make these great songs that out of these sad, terrible tragedies, we seem to be able to shine the best.”
Marrow Deep is the first Mastodon full-length to feature guitarist Nick Johnston, with heavy input from keyboardist João Nogueira. The band co-produced it at their own West End Sound in Atlanta with Patrik Berger (Lana Del Rey, Charli XCX) and Kurt Ballou (High On Fire, Converge), and handed the mix to Andrew Scheps (Adele, Black Sabbath, Metallica). The album also carries a long list of guest players, led off by lead single “Snakes For Dinner“, which features Queens Of The Stone Age frontman Josh Homme — his first appearance on a Mastodon recording in two decades.
To mark the release, Mastodon head out on “The Poisonous Weapons Tour“, a 27-date coast-to-coast run with Deafheaven and Alcest in tow. The trek opens September 16 in Orlando and works its way across the country before wrapping October 24 at Sick New World in Dallas.
Hinds left Mastodon in March 2025 and died in a motorcycle accident five months later; Johnston stepped in to replace him. He had been the band’s lead guitarist and one of its vocalists since 2000, playing alongside Sanders, Dailor and Kelliher for a quarter of a century.
