For a quarter of a century, Mastodon stood as one of the most singular and dependable forces in all of heavy music, a band whose very architecture seemed carved from bedrock. From the primal sludge of their early trilogy through the psychedelic, cosmic ambition of 2009’s Crack the Skye and beyond, the Atlanta four-piece evolved relentlessly while never once altering their foundation. The unbroken alliance of Brann Dailor, Troy Sanders, Bill Kelliher, and Brent Hinds was among the rarest things in rock, an intuitive four-way chemistry that felt genuinely permanent.
Then, in the cruelest possible sequence, that permanence shattered. Hinds parted ways with the band in March of 2025 and died in a motorcycle accident only months later that August, a loss compounded by the death of Dailor‘s mother, Michele Lawrence, mere weeks before the split. Five years on from Hushed and Grim, the longest silence of their career, Marrow Deep arrives as the ninth Mastodon album and the first ever made without Hinds, shouldering an almost unbearable weight and forced to answer a question no fan wanted to ask: can this band still be itself with a quarter of its heart missing?
The answer, remarkably, is yes, though not without scars. Grief is not so much a theme on Marrow Deep as the very air the record breathes, and the band has named the album with fitting solemnity after the Three Fates of Greek myth, the sisters who spin, measure, and finally sever the thread of a mortal life. Life, loss, and the fragile filaments that continue to bind us to those who have gone: this is the frame, and it hangs over all twelve tracks like a low grey sky that never fully lifts.
Facing that void, Mastodon made two decisive choices, and both prove inspired. Into the impossible role vacated by Hinds steps guitarist Nick Johnston, a fluent and gifted player wise enough not to attempt an imitation, while keyboardist João Nogueira, a presence on the previous record, is now a full member, lacing the songs with synths, organ, and mellotron that lend the band more overt melodic color than they have ever carried. Behind the desk, the pairing of Patrik Berger and Converge’s Kurt Ballou balances pop instinct against granite heaviness with real skill.
Crucially, the band refused to grieve in isolation, and the guest roster reads like a gathering of the clan. Josh Homme, Geezer Butler, Randy Blythe, Joe Duplantier, Neil Fallon, and much of Converge all lend their voices and hands, and that communal generosity turns out to be the album’s entire thesis. This is a record about catastrophic loss made by people flatly refusing to face it alone, and you can feel that warmth radiating from the very first bar, a circle of friends closing ranks around a wound.
Barbarians Blood throws the doors open with zero ceremony, Converge’s Ben Koller driving a punkish, forward-tilting groove that recalls the band’s earliest sludge scrubbed up with modern polish. It is all rhythm and momentum, making room for the first of Nogueira‘s synth solos and signaling immediately that the keyboards here are a lead instrument rather than mere decoration. As an opening statement it is lean and defiant, the sound of a band reminding you that whatever they have lost, they can still hit like a collapsing mountainside.
From there, Poisonous Weapons plants its feet in the dirt and refuses to move, a mid-paced pummel that leans on the interlocking riffs and tectonic rhythm work of the core trio. There is genuine defiance baked into its bones, the posture of a group with every reason to fold and no intention of doing so, and it lends its name to the tour rolling out behind the album. In sequence it deepens the foundation the opener laid, muscle reinforcing momentum.
Then comes Your Ghost Again, the beating heart of the entire record and the explicit elegy for Hinds. That it arrived back in June as a surprise standalone single reveals exactly how much it meant to the band. Sanders has spoken of his portion being wholly about and for Brent, and the song is fittingly untethered, a trippy, reverb-drenched drift that lets grief hang in the air rather than screaming it. It is less a headbanger than a séance, and it lands all the harder for its restraint, a group reaching through the haze for a departed brother.
Snakes For Dinner welcomes Josh Homme back to the fold for the first time in two decades, his backing vocals threading through a furious five-minute prog-metal rager built on serpentine, thrashing riffs. Yet that fury cloaks perhaps the saddest sentiment on the album, with Dailor describing it as his mother and Brent wrapped into a single overwhelming feeling of loss, the sense that death briefly swallows everything whole. Savage music carrying a shattered heart is Marrow Deep in microcosm, and the band chose it wisely to lead the campaign.
If the front half is front-loaded with aggression, Out Like a Lamb is the exhale that follows the storm, a smart piece of sequencing that lets air and light back into the room before the record can collapse into one sustained howl. It flows directly into In The Ruins, the third single and arguably the album’s emotional cornerstone. Born from the Hurricane Helene flooding that displaced Sanders‘s family for the better part of two years, it transforms wreckage into fuel, swelling from fragile quiet into hard-won catharsis, its animated video following a one-eyed creature named Frank through drowned and broken landscapes.
The album’s most adventurous stretch follows, and it belongs largely to Nogueira. They’re Coming For You swings the mood back toward creeping menace, while Golden Spires hands the keyboards and the band’s proggier instincts room to stretch into their most cinematic, expansive passage, the questing ambition of Crack the Skye refracted through a heavier and sadder lens. Moth and Bone may be the finest showcase of all, opening on a soft, glimmering keyboard figure of real delicacy before the band drags that reverie into heavier territory without ever quite dispelling its spell, beauty and brutality sharing one frame.
A Vampire’s Demeanor arrives as the pure adrenaline shot, Randy Blythe and Converge’s Nate Newton piling in with gang vocals to produce one of the meanest, most physical things here, all snarl and stomp and raised fists. It lands as a jolt at exactly the moment the record had begun to settle into reflection. The Vanishing, for my money, is the jaw-dropper, unfurling from the unmistakable fuzz bass of Geezer Butler into a smoky, blues-tinged homage to seventies heaviness, with Joe Duplantier adding his voice to the murk. Dailor‘s late mother’s devotion to Butler makes his presence feel less like a cameo than a wreath laid at the record’s center.
The Three Fates closes the record precisely where its concept always promised, and it goes out swinging. Clutch’s Neil Fallon, a Mastodon collaborator stretching all the way back to Leviathan, delivers a spoken-word sermon while the band empties the armory behind him, a towering, fire-and-brimstone finale capped by one final Nogueira solo. The sisters’ thread is cut, the album folds shut on the myth it was named for, and the effect is both an ending and a benediction, sending the record out on a defiant, communal roar rather than a whimper of mourning.
There is no honest way to review this album without acknowledging the Hinds-shaped hole at its center. His was the wild, unpredictable hand that so often shoved these songs somewhere stranger and more dangerous than they had any right to go, and there are stretches where you can sense the band reaching for a jolt of chaos only he could ever truly supply. Nick Johnston is superb and never once embarrasses himself in an unwinnable position, but capable and electrifying are different words, and once or twice the record settles for the former where its fallen founder would have insisted on the latter.
In conclusion, what Mastodon have forged from unimaginable grief is genuinely extraordinary. Measured against the sprawling gloom of Hushed and Grim it is leaner, warmer, and far more inviting; measured against the near-untouchable heights of Leviathan and Crack the Skye it cannot quite reach those summits, but vanishingly few records ever could, and it would be churlish to hold a band’s own past genius against them. As both a tribute to the man they lost and a declaration of where they go next, Marrow Deep succeeds emphatically, proving that even halved by fate, this remains one of the most ambitious and emotionally literate heavy bands on the planet.
My personal favorite tracks are the aching, elegiac Your Ghost Again, the smoky and atmospheric The Vanishing, and the deceptively sorrowful Snakes For Dinner, three moments where the band’s grief and grandeur fuse most completely. It is worth seeking out the accompanying short film The Mastodon in the Room, which lays their reckoning bare and grants the music enormous added weight. Nogueira‘s keyboards are the smartest addition to this band’s palette in years, and above all, Marrow Deep stands as a fitting salute to Brent Hinds, an irreplaceable talent whose shadow, and whose gift, still lingers over every note.
Order Marrow Deep here: https://www.nuclearblast.com/collections/mastodon
Rating: 9/10
Tracklist:
- Barbarians Blood (feat. Ben Koller)
- Poisonous Weapons
- Your Ghost Again
- Snakes For Dinner (feat. Josh Homme)
- Out Like a Lamb
- In the Ruins
- They’re Coming For You
- Golden Spires
- Moth and Bone
- A Vampire’s Demeanor (feat. Randy Blythe & Nate Newton)
- The Vanishing (feat. Geezer Butler & Joe Duplantier)
- The Three Fates (feat. Neil Fallon)
Band Members:
Troy Sanders – Bass, Vocals
Brann Dailor – Drums, Vocals
Bill Kelliher – Guitar, Vocals
Nick Johnston – Guitar, Vocals
João Nogueira – Keyboards
Additional Musicians:
Ben Koller – Drums (Barbarians Blood)
Josh Homme – Vocals (Snakes For Dinner)
Randy Blythe – Vocals, Nate Newton – Vocals (A Vampire’s Demeanor)
Geezer Butler – Bass, Joe Duplantier – Vocals (The Vanishing)
Neil Fallon – Vocals (The Three Fates)
Other Personnel:
Produced by Patrik Berger and Kurt Ballou
Label: Loma Vista Recordings (European release via Nuclear Blast)
Release Date: August 28, 2026
