Mastodon released a new album – their first since Brent Hinds’ death last year – in August and the band have been telling Consequence about the new record, Marrow Deep, and the upheavals that have happened within the group over the last few years.
You may recall that Hinds – one of the group’s founder members – left Mastodon in March 2025 amongst much bitterness. The band claimed it was a mutual decision, which the guitarist disputed. Just three weeks before he died in a motorcycle accident, he claimed he had been “kicked out” and added that he wouldn’t “miss being in a shit band with horrible humans.”
But even before then, there had been tragedy. In 2024 drummer Brann Dailor and his family lost their home to Hurricane Helene. The following year, Dailor also lost his mom.
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According to Dailor, the album’s lead single Your Ghost Again was inspired by Hinds and the spooky goings-on in the studio while they were recording: “I kept seeing him out of the corner of my eye, which is common, I think, with somebody that you’re really close to and you were in close quarters with for most of the time.
“When you’re in those familiar spaces and they’re not there, your mind plays tricks on you, and where they normally stand, kinda look over and get a little glimmer of hope that they’re there, and then it reminds you that they’re gone.”
“So, that’s what the lyrics became about with that song… Myself working through my mom’s passing and Brent’s passing, and the tumultuous times in between, and Troy’s loss with his house and everything that had happened there. Everything that had happened was right at the forefront.
“There wasn’t really time for much metaphor, so it was all literal. And that’s how we were trying to wrap our heads around it, was with the lyrics.”
The album’s artwork is inspired by Greek mythology and the three fates that determine our individual destiny. “They’re Zeus’ daughters and they basically pull the thread of your life,” Dailor explains, “The first daughter starts your life. The second daughter decides what happens in your life, and then the third one has the scissors and she decides when your life is over.
“And I always thought that the similarities between my mom and Brent were that they were these like Keith Richards style people, where you thought that they both had nine lives.”
“Brent (was) kind of always walking into the deep end, and it didn’t seem like he had a care in the world sometimes. But he would always emerge, smelling like roses. Whereas the three of us would kind of be like, ‘Man, if I tried that, I’d be dead ten times by now.’ So, that was always kind of fascinating. I was like, man, somebody’s looking out for that dude because I don’t know.”
