There are bands who make metal and there are bands who make metal feel like a place.
Mastodon have spent twenty-five years building and refining that place. It has had swamps in it, astronauts, dying kings, desert hallucinations, ancient gods, personal demons and enough distortion to knock the fillings out of a horse. Now there is a grave in the middle of it.
Marrow Deep is the first Mastodon album made without founding guitarist Brent Hinds, who left the band in early 2025 and died later that year in a motorcycle accident at 51. That fact hangs over the record before the needle even touches the vinyl. But Mastodon have wisely refused to turn the album into a mausoleum. This isn’t music about lying down beside the dead. It is music about getting up.
Mastodon have not attempted to replace Brent Hinds. They have attempted something far harder. They have attempted to continue.
The distinction matters.
Hinds was not merely the guitarist who happened to occupy one side of the stage. His playing was woven into the band’s DNA: strange bends, bluegrass fingerprints, psychedelic instincts, sudden violence, the feeling that the man might disappear halfway through a solo and return from another dimension carrying a bottle of whiskey and a new riff. His contribution to albums such as Blood Mountain and Crack the Skye helped make Mastodon unmistakable.
So the temptation would have been to make Marrow Deep a memorial record. Instead, Mastodon have made a Mastodon record.
“Poisonous Weapons” brings the fire, the opener “Barbarians Blood” brings the fury while “Moth And Bone” brings a welcome tempo shift and a chance to delve deeper into the musical maelstrom.
The current line-up retains Brann Dailor, Troy Sanders and Bill Kelliher, with guitarist Nick Johnston joining the band and João Nogueira contributing keyboards. The band co-produced the album with Patrik Berger and Kurt Ballou. That combination tells you something about the record’s ambition: this is not an attempt to preserve Mastodon behind glass. It is a living band figuring out what it sounds like now.
If Remission was the hungry animal, Leviathan the great sea monster, Blood Mountain the fever dream and Crack the Skye the cosmic cathedral, then Marrow Deep appears to be the record made after the cathedral has burned down.
You don’t rebuild it exactly as it was. You stand in the ashes and start making noise.
That makes “Your Ghost Again” especially important. It is impossible not to hear the song through the circumstances surrounding Hinds’ death, and the band’s own descriptions of the record make grief and resilience central to its conception. The title Marrow Deep itself evokes relationships and losses that have penetrated beyond the skin, beyond the muscles, right into the bones.
“Snakes for Dinner”, with Homme on vocals, is a particularly inspired choice. Homme’s relationship with Mastodon goes back decades, including his appearance on “Colony of Birchmen”, and bringing him back now gives the record a wonderful sense of history without turning it into nostalgia.
Then there is “In the Ruins”, which has already shown another side of the album: tonal shifts between crushing heaviness and gentler melody, the sort of structural trick Mastodon have been perfecting since the beginning but which still sounds like nobody else quite knows how to do it. That is Mastodon’s great contribution to modern metal.
Progressive metal can sometimes become a mathematical exercise conducted by men who have memorised every odd time signature but forgotten to write a song. Mastodon generally avoid that trap. Their riffs have weight. Their melodies have blood in them. Even when the songs become elaborate, they tend to feel like bodies moving through dangerous terrain rather than diagrams on a whiteboard.
Marrow Deep therefore arrives at an interesting point in their history. It is a test of whether a band can lose part of its own history and still possess a future. The evidence clearly says yes.
Brann Dailor is still attacking the drums as though somebody owes him money. Troy Sanders still sounds like he swallowed a thunderstorm. Bill Kelliher still knows that a great riff does not require an explanation. Nick Johnston brings his own musicianship rather than trying to dress up as Hinds. And the songs released so far suggest a band that has decided grief is not the opposite of energy.
Mastodon have spent their career making music about monsters. Now they have made a record about surviving one.
And it sounds fucking magnificent.
Donnie’s Rating: 9/10
Marrow Deep is out on 28th August 2026
