On its first album since the death of guitarist and vocalist Brent Hinds, the metal band reckons with grief while gesturing toward the wild, energetic sound of its past. If they could’ve, Mastodon would’ve played with Brent Hinds forever. When the sludge metal giants fired their troubled but brilliant guitarist in March 2025, it was the culmination of a long, doomed effort to pull him back from the edge—to get him sober, to reengage him with his love of music, to help him move past his petty, self-sabotaging resentments. Even after the split, his bandmates hoped it would just be a temporary break. That never happened. Hinds died in a motorcycle crash in Atlanta on August 20, 2025. Two weeks later, Mastodon started recording their ninth album, Marrow Deep.
A New Chapter in Grief
Even more than most metal bands, Mastodon have long wrestled with personal tragedy and grief in their music. Marrow Deep was intended to deal with drummer Brann Dailor’s mother’s suffering and her death at the end of 2024. By the time they entered the studio, it inevitably became about Hinds, too. The wild, untamed spark he once brought to the band will be much missed, but his absence also means Marrow Deep finds the band as functional as they’ve been in years. After the disappointment of 2021’s bloated Hushed and Grim, an album that Hinds barely contributed to, they sound like they’re back on the right track.
Gesturing Toward the Past
We’ll likely never again hear the roaring, rugged Mastodon of the band’s first three albums, but Marrow Deep at least gestures toward some of that youthful energy. The album marks the recorded debuts of touring guitarist Nick Johnston and the band’s first full-time keyboardist in João Nogueira, and both players seem to have provided an infusion of inspiration. Nogueira’s keys are everywhere, adding a formidable melodic counterweight to Bill Kelliher and Johnston’s guitars. Dailor sounds reinvigorated as a drummer, peppering the songs with more of the busy, Neil Peart-like fills he made his name on in the band’s early days. His clean vocals, no longer competing with Hinds’ Southern-rock twang, settle into an uncluttered equilibrium with Troy Sanders’ robust growl.
The best songs here are mostly the high-energy ones. Lead single “Your Ghost Again” uncorks a spiraling sludge-thrash riff that could have been on Blood Mountain, then slots it into a herky-jerky arrangement next to spacey synths and a hooky chorus that calls out to Hinds from across the veil.
Guest musicians also play a major role on Marrow Deep. Neil Fallon and Josh Homme, contributors to two of the biggest Mastodon songs in “Blood and Thunder” and “Colony of Birchmen,” return with swaggering vocal features on “The Three Fates” and “Snakes for Dinner,” and Geezer Butler plays the extended bass intro to “The Vanishing.”
Operational and Refined
Unfortunately, too much of Marrow Deep feels noodly and meandering, even if most of its songs do eventually work themselves up into a full-force lather. It’s not even that the songs are too long; it’s more that Mastodon seem to be leaning into the idea that dynamics can only be achieved when there’s a slow, pretty part to undercut each heavy riff. Coming from a band whose thrilling unpredictability was once a calling card, it’s hard to forgive turgid fare like “In the Ruins” and “Moth and Bone.”
On the other hand, I’ve seen Hinds ruin a half dozen Mastodon shows over the years, with drunken tantrums and sloppy playing. Hinds’ absence from Marrow Deep draws his volatile duality, the fire that long burned at the heart of Mastodon, into sharp focus. Without his mad-scientist songwriting and uninhibited guitar work, the band’s ceiling will almost certainly be lower. Their floor should also be higher. On Marrow Deep, for the first time in years, they sound fully operational.