The estate of Brent Hinds has issued a statement clarifying what its lawsuit against MASTODON is actually about, after two weeks in which the public argument ran almost entirely on a different subject.
The estate filed in Fulton County Court on September 3, claiming the guitarist had never been bought out of his share of MASTODON and its related businesses before his death in August 2025, and objecting to the band's use of his likeness on the recently released album "Marrow Deep". Members of MASTODON later responded with a statement denying "allegations of ill intent" and expressing regret that "a private business dispute with the estate of our dear departed friend Brent Hinds was made public."
In a new statement given to Guitar World, the estate said the coverage had settled on the wrong thing. "Unfortunately, public discussion has largely focused on MASTODON's inclusion of Brent's image in artwork for a new album and has sometimes portrayed the lawsuit as an effort by his family to obtain a windfall. That is not what the case is about."
Its account of the sequence is this: "After Brent was excluded from MASTODON, he sought an accounting, valuation, and orderly separation of interests he held in entities owned by the founding members. He passed away before that process was finished… Brent had not yet received compensation for any of his interests." According to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the band sent a cheque for $80,000 as a buyout along with a document summarising separation terms. Hinds never signed it, and the estate has not cashed the cheque, saying it wants a full accounting first to establish what the share is actually worth.
The album cover, the estate argues, matters only because it goes to the same question. It "illustrates a broader commercial issue related to merchandising revenues. More specifically, it relates to whether Brent's exclusion from the band discontinued his, and now his Estate's, entitlement to share in MASTODON's merchandising revenue." The image of Hinds appears on "Marrow Deep" — an album he did not play on — beneath Atropos, the Fate who cuts the thread, alongside the face of Brann Dailor's mother, Michele Jeanne Lawrence, who also died in 2025. The estate's position: the band "cannot fairly invoke Brent's identity when it is commercially useful, while simultaneously denying the continuing relevance of his contributions when accounting for his interests."
The suit also objects to Dailor, Troy Sanders and Bill Kelliher discussing "details about [Hinds's] private life that they learned in confidence — details he chose to keep private while he was alive" in the 35-minute documentary "The Mastodon In The Room".
The statement closes by trying to lower the temperature. The lawsuit does not ask "anyone to choose sides or diminish what Brent and his bandmates created together. Nor does it ask the public to judge anyone's grief or intentions." Hinds's family, it says, has been "subjected to personal attacks and harassment based on speculation and secondhand interpretations", and it asks for "compassion and respect while the legal process moves forward."
Hinds played guitar in MASTODON for twenty-five years and eight albums. He died on August 20, 2025, after a motorcycle collision in Atlanta.