Marrow Deep

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. “We were certain that two months later, two years later, we were going to have the high five—I’m sorry, dude. I’m sorry, too, man. I love you,” bassist Troy Sanders told GQ earlier this year. 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.

Even more than most metal bands, Mastodon have long wrestled with personal tragedy and grief in their music. 2009’s uncompromisingly progressive Crack the Skye was inspired in part by the suicide of drummer Brann Dailor’s sister, Skye, and its more streamlined follow-up, The Hunter, found Hinds reckoning with the death of his brother. Emperor of Sand spun an extended metaphor about cancer, which had just killed guitarist Bill Kelliher’s mom. Marrow Deep was intended to deal with Dailor’s mother’s suffering from rheumatoid arthritis 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 Mastodon 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.

We’ll likely never again hear the roaring, rugged Mastodon of the band’s first three albums—Remission, Leviathan, and Blood Mountain, as perfect a trilogy as there’s ever been in heavy metal—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 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 Sanders’ robust growl. Marrow Deep cautiously nudges Mastodon into some new territory, but a lot of it works because it delivers a version of the band that had gone missing from the past few albums.

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: “I saw your ghost again/Followed by crushing feelings of regret.” The bludgeoning “Poisonous Weapons” is a midtempo crusher with mud-thick basslines and strained howls courtesy of Sanders, while “Golden Spires” is the most impressive showcase of Dailor’s dexterous drumming since Crack the Skye. Guest musicians also play a major role on Marrow Deep. Clutch’s Neil Fallon and Queens of the Stone Age’s 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 Freaking Butler plays the extended bass intro to “The Vanishing.” Knowing it’s Geez working the four-string makes it a lot less deflating when that song reveals itself as a chilled-out “Planet Caravan” smoke break.

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; other than “The Vanishing” and “The Three Fates,” nothing breaks the six-minute mark. 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.” Those are the moments where they miss Hinds the most.

On the other hand, I’ve seen Hinds ruin a half dozen Mastodon shows over the years, with drunken tantrums, sloppy playing, and more recently, utter disconnection from his bandmates. On the nights when Hinds harnessed his feral genius, Mastodon could be transcendent. Just as often, they looked like three musicians desperately trying to keep a fourth from unraveling the thing they’d built together. 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.

Mastodon: Marrow Deep

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