It’s nearly been a year since Mastodon co-founder Brent Hinds died in a tragic bike accident. With their ex-guitarist being at odds with the band at the time of his death, there were a lot of unanswered questions for both the band and their fans alike. And nor was this the only traumatic loss that the group endured that year. Here, the Atlanta metal masters tell us how they faced their grief head on to write Marrow Deep, a triumphant album that saved them during their darkest hour…
Mastodon’s plane had just landed in Alaska when they got the news. Ten months on, drummer Brann Dailor and bassist Troy Sanders still vividly recall the moment: they were waiting at baggage claim when they saw Bill Kelliher take a call. With a concerned look on his face, their guitarist turned to them and silently mouthed “Brent” while he listened on intently.
“We knew with that one word,” Troy tells Kerrang! today as Mastodon shelter from the decibels backstage at Denmark’s Copenhell festival. “We knew what that meant.”
Indeed, as soon as Bill saw Raísa, the ex-wife of his former Mastodon bandmate Brent Hinds, calling him, his thoughts went into overdrive.
“I was like, ‘He’s either fucking really gone off the rails and he’s in jail, or he’s killed somebody… Or he’s dead,’” Bill recalls. “And it was the latter.”
Late on Wednesday, August 20, Brent Hinds died when his motorcycle collided with an SUV that did not yield while making a U-Turn in Atlanta. He was gone. There was nothing Mastodon – who were booked to play Alaska State Fair Festival the very next day – could do but wait for their bags as grief took hold. For Bill there was but one glimmer of comfort. “Part of me was like, ‘At least now he’s at rest,’” he confides.
William Brent Hinds had been many things in his 51 years on Earth. With 25 of them spent in Mastodon, to Brann, Troy and Bill he was a brother, friend and confidant, not to mention a musical genius. But he was more besides. While capable of profound sensitivity and a loveable cheekiness, he was also metal’s perennial wildman whose appearances on and offstage were often defined by unpredictable if not outright self-destructive behaviour. It was behaviour that would ultimately play a part in the band announcing, in March 2025, that Mastodon and Brent had “mutually decided to part ways”. Brent, in turn, issued a scathing reply, saying he had more accurately been “kicked out” and attacking the character of his former bandmates. It was, if nothing else, true to the spirit of someone who had always lived unapologetically.
“He was the only person I knew that didn’t have a [self-preservation] switch,” Brann reflects. “It’s like I’d be walking with him into the deep end and at some point I’d be like, ‘I’m not going any further, I’m worried for my life,’ and he wouldn’t.”
“He was going through very, very difficult times,” Troy offers. “I don’t mean to cheapen it, but with his unhinged love of life and free spirit, he was one of two people in my life where I always felt I would get ‘the phone call’ and be very saddened, but not surprised. I hope that doesn’t sound cold.”
After leaving the airport, Brann says Mastodon “got pretty drunk together and cried” before pulling themselves together to play the next day. Riddled with grief yet with fans gathered before them, the duty to say something – anything – about Brent weighed heavily. After all, they had largely been silent since his departure from the group.
Brann summoned whatever words he could, and did remarkably well. Behind the scenes, however, the band were shellshocked. For Brann, it was the second immense loss to have befallen him in the space of six months. On February 12, 2025, his beloved mother, Michele Jeanne Lawrence, passed away after surviving a lifetime of physical pain, including innumerable hospital visits. All the while, she also carried with her the grief of losing her teenage daughter – Brann’s sister – Skye, whose death inspired their 2009 masterpiece Crack The Skye. Michele was as strong as they come. Her nurses called her their “miracle girl” while Bill says he was convinced Michele was going to outlive Brann.
“It just seemed like Brent and my mom were these two Keith Richards-style humans, they were constantly eluding the Grim Reaper,” Brann says. “Even though Brent was constantly tempting the Grim Reaper, and my mom was, unfortunately, just dealt a shitty hand in life, and given all these medical problems.”
Brann heard fans’ calls for more insight from the band in the wake of Brent’s death. He was just in no position to help.
“I’ve always been the, ‘Heeeey! How’s it going!?’ guy,” he explains. “And I’m not putting on a show – I want to make everybody feel happy. It comes from my childhood. When my sister was sick, I was just a clown, like, ‘Heeeeeey, Skye!’ Same with my mom, for years and years. I would go to the hospital and do stupid dances and whatever I could to make her feel better. I wanted to do that for people, but I couldn’t get out of bed, I was really depressed. I needed to wrap my head around all of it, I needed to write about it.”
“It just seemed like Brent and my mom were constantly eluding the Grim Reaper”
One week after Alaska State Fair, Mastodon decamped to the studio. Though Brann wanted to just “crawl under his house for a month”, he reasoned that crying in the vocal booth was more productive than “being a lump of shit, laying in bed and rotting”. The result is Marrow Deep – a brilliant, beautiful yet bruised record dedicated to the memory of William Brent Hinds and Michele J Lawrence. The words Marrow Deep neither appear in the lyrics or christen a song. It’s a blunt observation from its creators.
“It’s a representation of the two relationships lost, my mom and Brent,” Brann says. “Those relationships are in the marrow, it’s as deep as you can get.”
Today, Bill marvels at the lyrics on the record.
“It’s fucking no holds barred,” he praises. “I can see a lot of new tattoos of these words on fans in the future. There’s a lot of fucking deep shit.”
The upside of all of this soul-searching is that the men K! encounter today backstage at Copenhell are, yes, still grieving, but not defeated. Like Deftones’ Diamond Eyes or Alice In Chains’ Black Gives Way To Blue, Marrow Deep possesses a dual consciousness: it documents tragedy, but also transcends it.
Today, Troy’s smile beams through his enormous beard as he explains how their latest summer tour might be his “favourite”. As in… ever. Bill is similarly ecstatic, especially about his unfolding bromance with new guitarist Nick Johnston (“Man, I just wanna kiss that dude, he’s so great”). Bill looks great, too, so much so he even lifts up his T-shirt to proudly show off his weight loss.
And Brann? Well, he’s still buzzing from meeting Keanu Reeves at Download… and while he was wearing his River’s Edge T-shirt, no less (“I always have it packed just in case”). Alas, Brann was so starstruck he forgot to tell Keanu that Poisonous Weapons from Marrow Deep actually begins with an audio snippet from Mr. Matrix’s 1986 crime noir.
Mastodon are in a great place right now, but this is something they had to fight for. The first thing you hear on the album is Troy bellowing, ‘We’re in danger / Losing everything’ on Barbarians Blood.
“That opening statement means we need to make things work now and embrace the moment,” he says. “This is another beautiful opportunity that Mastodon has to write a new record. Underneath the grief, there is a sea of gratitude.”
And now, finally, they’re ready to talk about it all. The grief. The gratitude. The new record.
The new dawn of Mastodon.
In 2021, his words were poignant. Now they seem eerily prophetic.
“It feels like someone has to die for us to make an album,” Brent told K! for what would be our final interview with him. “When loved ones close to us pass, we feel obligated to pay tribute to them musically.”
At the time he was talking about how Mastodon’s Hushed And Grim honoured their late manager Nick John, who died of cancer in September 2018. It was the latest elegy in a discography inseparable from the accumulated grief that had so often informed it.
“Fortunately, and unfortunately, we’re getting pretty good at writing albums through the tragedy,” reflects Troy.
“I just keep riffing,” explains Bill of how he copes. “And it seems like the more fucking tragedies we go through, it just stirs up more riffs.”
“I really, honestly, thought that before we got into this process that we might actually be able to make a record and sing about the Loch Ness Monster and Bigfoot again…” sighs Brann.
Instead they would need to make a fitting tribute to Brent. It would be no easy task.
“That was 25 years of being in Mastodon together,” says Troy. “The process of his death was more complex than one might assume. Prior to Mastodon, I was in a band with Brent for seven years, so he and I had 32 years together, which is the majority of my life. Relationships rarely last that long in any form. That’s a lot of history to sort through.”
Marrow Deep celebrates Brent’s life and the gifts he shared with the group. Its lead single Your Ghost Again was inspired by Brann’s experience of re-entering the studio after he was gone, half expecting to see him lurking in his old spots.
“He was always to my right,” Brann recalls. “If he locked in on a riff that he was feeling, he’d just smoke a boatload of weed, crank his guitar up louder than than fucking any Motörhead concert, and then we would have a big spiritual musical connection.”
Yet with references to ‘crushing feelings of regret’ and ‘visions of a non-existent future’, Your Ghost Again also speaks to the uncomfortable truth. Mastodon had to mourn Brent Hinds twice: once when he left the band, and another on that fateful day in August.
“It was kind of a long time coming for him to leave the band, even though we didn’t want to go down that road, and we knew that, I don’t know…” Bill pauses, collecting his thoughts. “If he wasn’t in our band, we didn’t know what would happen to him, but we couldn’t go on any longer with the way it was. Things were happening with him. He was really on a decline in a lot of ways.”
“We came to the very unfortunate conclusion that we had to move forward without him, because we were not moving forward at all,” Troy recalls.
“We thought at some point we were going to bury the hatchet with Brent, have a hug and be like, ‘That was some dumb sh*t…’”
They outlined what transpired in their recent The Mastodon In The Room video, from his diminished involvement in the studio to how Brent’s inebriated and volatile behaviour impacted not only their live shows, but their lives.
“He was very complex,” Troy says. “He had a lot of brilliance and love in his heart. At the same time, he unfortunately had a mountain of demons that were weaved in and out of his life that he wrestled with, always.”
“He was such a creative force,” Bill reflects. “At one time he was. He was always an incredible guitar player. But people have addictions. We all have – I’m no saint. When you get that much attention as a ‘rock star’, you can go down different roads with it.”
Bill knew this better than most, having nearly died from alcohol-induced pancreatitis on tour. He got clean, took regular trips back home on tour and immersed himself in gardening.
“I tried to talk to Brent, like, ‘Dude, just be appreciative that you’re doing what you love,’” says Bill of how he attempted to reach him. “He was such a tortured soul, tortured artist, he couldn’t see the light. He wanted to fight everything all the time. To me, that’s addictive behaviour, because when you’re fucked-up all the time, you feel like shit, and then you always have people like, ‘You’re the best! Fuck everybody else, take these drugs, drink this booze, get up there and fucking shred.’ It gets in your head. We were not yes men – that’s why he stopped hanging around with us as a band, because we were telling him, ‘No, you can’t do that!’ like a kid. But he was a rebel in every way.”
So it was that the band sat Brent down for a summit. Troy read out a list of things that were making him deeply unhappy, all of them revolving in some manner around Brent. The guitarist walked out halfway through. It was the last Troy ever saw him.
“I feel terrible how it ended,” admits Bill. “I wish he could be alive, and that someday we could have mended our ways. If he fucked up, he would always admit it a couple days later, like, ‘I was being a dick. I drank too much, I’m really sorry. I love you guys,’ and he came back around as a human. But those demons would get him the next day. He would just get back into the booze and be a dick.”
“Things got shitty towards the end, but [him leaving] was out of love, and I really wanted him to be happy,” adds Brann. “None of us thought it was going to end in his demise. We thought at some point we were going to bury the hatchet, have a hug and be like, ‘That was some dumb shit…’”
Fate had other plans. The hatchet could not be buried, and that is addressed on the spectacular new song Snakes For Dinner. On the one hand, it includes a moving lyrical reference to Hearts Alive, Brent’s epic composition from Leviathan. On the other, it addresses a painful lack of closure.
“When someone passes, you do an autopsy of the relationship,” explains Brann. “You go back to the beginning and everything that transpired, and what you could have done differently. The good times, the bad times, things left unsaid, things left like a frayed rope. It’s an unfulfillable longing, you can’t fix it. Not a good feeling.”
In the immediate wake of Brent’s death, Brann received an avalanche of texts. One was from Queens Of The Stone Age’s Josh Homme who, instead of offering condolences, assumed a role that Brann typically played for others. He lightened the mood by chastising Brann for neglecting to recommend a “food item” to him. “I really appreciated it from him,” says Brann. Josh also came through as a collaborator, with his feature on Snakes For Dinner being their first collaboration since 2006’s Blood Mountain album.
“For the chorus – ‘When you left, you took the moon and stars’ – it’s like it’s the next day after [your loved one is] gone, and you feel like they took everything with them,” says Brann. “You’re just left marinating on those relationships. That’s when the sadness really creeps in.”
In lieu of closure, the band have clung to their memories. To make The Mastodon In The Room, Bill, Troy and Brann watched back countless hours of old footage.
“Stuff like us running around London outside of The Underworld,” smiles Bill. “It’s six in the morning and the guys are smoking cigarettes through their noses. Brent was hilarious. When he and I started laughing together, it was the funniest shit in the world. Watching those videos reminded me of who he used to be. He was so full of energy, laughs and creativity. We were this unstoppable force, the four of us, and we just lost it through the years… I’m just glad we were actually able to grab hold of that lightning in a bottle for a pretty long period of time.”
“I just like to remember the good things,” says Troy. “And there were millions of those examples: the passion and guitar playing and creativity that Brent brought meant we were able to do things that had this intangible magic.”
And in order for Mastodon to have a future, they would have to find a new way to conjure it.
If you want any indication as to what Marrow Deep means to Mastodon, look no further than what happened to Bill Kelliher on March 23 this year. It was his 55th birthday, and he was driving across Atlanta on his way to a “Brazilian wood store” when he put on the record, having purposefully taken time off listening to it to get a fresh perspective.
“I’m not even shitting you, man,” he smiles. “My fucking face was squeezing out tears. I was fucking bawling, crying, and had tears of joy, too. I pulled into the Brazilian wood depot and I couldn’t go in. I was like, ‘I gotta go back in the car and dry my eyes.’ I was a mess.”
What he heard was not just the pain they had endured, but also the band as he longed for it to be, with all members on the same page.
“It’s on this upward trajectory,” he says, proudly. “We’re just getting better at what we do, I feel.”
“It’s on this upward trajectory, we’re just getting better at what we do”
What has been required to get to this point is laid bare on In The Ruins, which sees the Mastomen pose themselves an existential question: ‘We don’t get over this / Can we grow around?’ For Brann, this growth would have to occur without his mother, Michele J Lawrence. She had always been his battery pack. The first gigs he saw were his mum’s band performing covers of Black Sabbath, Judas Priest, Yes, Genesis and King Crimson. When he started playing drums, she would invite his friends to watch him while making sandwiches and drinks for everyone.
“That meant everything,” Brann says. “She was the proudest mom and I really missed her on this record. I was like, ‘Man, a lot of the songs are about her and she can’t chime in like she could with The Motherload.’ When I was in the ICU with her, because she had fallen and had a brain haemorrhage and was in a coma, that’s when I wrote most of the lyrics on Once More ’Round The Sun. She was always a big inspiration, just her unwillingness to give in to all the horribleness that had visited her unfairly, yet she always had a smile on her face.”
The memories keep on coming back.
“She broke herself out of the hospital to come to one of our shows once,” he grins. “She showed up with a shaved head, like, ‘Fuck yeah!’”
For years, Bill and Troy had watched on with admiration as Brann did everything he could for his mother. They saw how her passing pierced him.
“The love they shared transcends anything I can think of at the moment,” says Troy.
“He’s one of the strongest dudes that I know,” begins Bill. “We’ve gone through a lot together, and he doesn’t always share his emotions, even when it’s tough. But this time I would say, ‘Are you alright?’ and he was like, ‘No.’ I was like, ‘It’s okay, dude, I lost my mom, lost my dad. It’s fucking hard…”
Bill takes off his glasses and rubs his eyes dry.
“Brann’s mom was such a fucking cheerleader for us and he did everything as far as all the help that he gave for her, because she needed it,” he adds. “I told him ‘Dude, you did everything you possibly fucking could to keep your mom happy and healthy.’”
Marrow Deep’s standout moment, The Vanishing drives at the heart of all this, while also sharing connective tissue with Crack The Skye. It contains Mastodon’s most intimate lyric yet: ‘I see my mother join my beloved sister / Celestial bodies form unbroken to fly the ancient skies.’
“My preferred afterlife fantasy for my mom and sister is that they’re these beautiful constellations,” says Brann. “It’s like I was going into the universe and making sure they found each other, and when I saw that they did, I was like, ‘She found Skye, they’re good.’ And the fact that Geezer Butler is playing on it…”
Indeed, Marrow Deep features a host of Mastodon’s friends, Brann says, “helping out”. This includes the aforementioned Josh Homme, plus Converge’s Nate Newton and Lamb Of God’s Randy Blythe (A Vampire’s Demeanour), Clutch’s Neil Fallon (The Three Fates), Converge’s Ben Koller (Barbarians Blood) and, on The Vanishing, Gojira’s Joe Duplantier and Black Sabbath’s legendary bassist. Geezer was Michele’s favourite.
“She was always like, ‘He writes the lyrics!’” smiles Brann. “She would absolutely love the song. It’s still a pinch-me moment on the record. He could have just hit an open A, and I would have still been like, ‘FEATURING GEEZER BUTLER ON THE OPEN A!’ (laughs).”
If The Vanishing is a reminder of what Mastodon lost, it’s worth being thankful for what they’ve gained, too. In a moving twist of fate, new guitarist Nick arrived in Atlanta to hang with them on the same day Michele passed away.
“We were super-sad, Brann was in shock, and then we’re like, ‘Oh, hi Nick, welcome to Atlanta…’” remembers Troy. “Nick is such a sweetheart, he was like, ‘Should I leave?’ And we said, ‘Absolutely not. This is the reason why you should be here.’ So our relationship started as deep and as strong as humanly possible.”
“He’s brought an injection of adrenaline into the band,” Bill says.
And with keyboardist João Nogueira on board, too, Marrow Deep is bubbling with creativity.
“That was, to me, the most exciting thing,” says Troy. “Having all five of us in the room together in the studio itching to contribute.”
“I’m proud of us for not just collapsing and saying, ‘Hey, we had a good run…’”
Mastodon know there will be sceptics out there about a Brent-less incarnation of their sound. They experienced it when he was still alive.
“I’m excited to see what people think about it,” Brann says. “I felt a different kind of pressure from this record because it’s just been the four of us for so long. With this one, I can tell that people are like, ‘Let’s see what you got, we don’t think you can do it.’”
“The first show we had with Nick, everyone was trying to point out how he doesn’t ‘sound like Brent’, or how ‘Mastodon was Brent’, and all this shit, which is not true,” continues Bill. “Everybody wants to say bad things when something changes. As long as Mastodon is happy with what we’re doing, that’s the only thing that matters to me. I don’t write riffs for Joe Blow.”
To be fair, even the blowiest of Joe Blows are going to be blown away by the time Marrow Deep’s final track The Three Fates wraps. It features Neil Fallon in booming voice, but the show-stealer comes from a mesmerising, extended instrumental passage from the new guys.
“I wanted to address this slow curse that I felt was visiting us,” says Brann. “Sometimes a curse is not an immediate thing, you don’t just wake up with a tail. It creeps and weaves this web over your life. When João and Nick go back and forth, I feel that’s us lifting the curse and getting past it, and foreshadowing what’s to come with these two amazing musicians that we’ve added.”
“As we go forward, we will always carry and recognise Brent’s legacy, without a doubt,” says Troy. “We’ll never deny how huge of an influence, and how massive he was in the creation of Mastodon. But through the tragedy, there is triumph. I’m proud of us for not just feeling overwhelmingly pitiful for ourselves, or just collapsing and saying, ‘Hey, we had a good run.’ It would be doing a massive disservice to our own being to not continue – there’s so much life in us.”
Marrow Deep is released August 28 via Loma Vista Recordings.
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