MASTODON have spoken at length about the two deaths that sit at the centre of "Marrow Deep", the album arriving August 28 via Loma Vista Recordings. Appearing on SiriusXM's "Trunk Nation With Eddie Trunk" on August 6, singer/bassist Troy Sanders, drummer/vocalist Brann Dailor and guitarist Bill Kelliher laid out a timeline that reads like an endurance test.
The record is the band's first full-length without founding guitarist and singer Brent Hinds, who was fired in March 2025 and died five months later in a motorcycle accident. Dailor lost his mother, Michele Lawrence, in February 2025. Both losses are the thematic core of the album.
"Obviously we didn't want the album to be about what it's about, and we would take all the songs and all the lyrics back if we could have our people back, but that's not the situation," Dailor said.
He traced how the writing unfolded. The band had started work a couple of years earlier, paused for the "Leviathan" 20th-anniversary tour with LAMB OF GOD, and resolved at the end of it to get serious. "That's where we experienced some turmoil with our brother Brent, and I, unfortunately, lost my mother. And we were kind of working away on stuff, and it was tough." A European summer tour followed, then the studio was booked for September 2025 — and at the end of August, Hinds died.
"We still had to go into the studio in about a week after losing Brent and kind of thought that maybe it was not the best idea. We weren't sure, but it ended up being exactly what we needed," Dailor said, "to kind of go in there and lean on each other and just dig in on these songs and put every little bit of all of these couple of tragedies that, unfortunately, visited us into the music, into the lyrics, into everything about it."
Sanders, who co-writes lyrics with Dailor, pointed out this is not the band's first such record — 2021's "Hushed And Grim" followed the death of longtime manager Nick John. "Since 'Crack The Skye', it's been therapeutic and very helpful when we can channel all the things happening in our real life to the lyrics," he said. "It's very relatable to anyone that cares to listen, because we're just human. We're not bigger or better than anyone else. And when we turn these dark, tragic things lyrically into something that we hope to be bright and beautiful that lives forever, that's an achievement that we're shooting for."
He was blunt about his own state while writing. "I didn't know where my head and brain and heart were. But it was very, very, very helpful for me to process all this information, putting my heart to my pen, pen to paper, and then that paper through the microphone."
"Marrow Deep" was co-produced by the band at their own West End Sound in Atlanta with Patrik Berger and Kurt Ballou (HIGH ON FIRE, CONVERGE), and mixed by Andrew Scheps (BLACK SABBATH, METALLICA). It is also the first MASTODON full-length featuring new guitarist Nick Johnston, with substantial contributions from keyboardist João Nogueira.
Source: blabbermouth.net