Mastodon, Brent Hinds, and the strange symmetry of two new eras
The animal in the doorway
Fifteen years ago today, Mastodon released an album with a face that appeared to have come from somewhere outside ordinary zoology. Its many-coloured wooden jaws gaped around a dark opening. The creature had the density of an idol, the symmetry of an impossible heraldic animal and the slightly alarming quality of something that might have been unearthed, worshipped or invented during a fever. On 27 September 2011, The Hunter arrived with thirteen songs and a new way of presenting a band whose previous records had built their own increasingly elaborate worlds.
On 27 September 2026, that object looks back at us from the far side of another threshold. Mastodon have only just released Marrow Deep, the first studio album of a changed line-up, and the sense of standing between epochs is unusually difficult to ignore.
The coincidence is worth taking seriously without pretending that a calendar is capable of prophecy. In September 2006, Blood Mountain, Mastodon's third album and their major-label debut, had carried four musicians further into the mythology they had been constructing since the beginning. In September 2007, Brent Hinds sustained a devastating head injury in Las Vegas. Crack the Skye followed in 2009, extraordinary music born in the years after that event. The Hunter, two years later, was a deliberate release from the expectation that Mastodon would produce ever denser conceptual architecture. Now, almost exactly fifteen years after that release and twenty years after Blood Mountain, a band altered by Hinds's departure and death is carrying its ninth studio album into the world. The present invites us to read the old record not as a minor diversion between grander statements, but as the first full demonstration that Mastodon could change their shape and remain recognisably themselves.
This anniversary has a particular tenderness. Hinds died in August 2025, months after leaving the group he had helped form. Marrow Deep is dedicated to him and to drummer and vocalist Brann Dailor's mother, Michele Lawrence. It is consequently impossible to write about The Hunter's new beginning in 2011 without hearing the new beginning taking place in 2026, or to revisit its title without thinking of the person it commemorated. The Hunter was named for Brent's brother Brad, who died in a hunting accident in 2010. A record remembered for its colour, immediacy and occasional absurdity is also a memorial. That conjunction has always been central to Mastodon. They have repeatedly found a way to construct fantastic beasts, spaceships, forests and emperors around the most terrestrial facts of living: people disappear, relationships change, and those who remain must find somewhere to put the love.
There is also a visual argument to be made. The Hunter broke the run of sleeves created by Paul Romano, its cover made instead from an intricate wooden sculpture by AJ Fosik. Once More 'Round the Sun, in 2014, arrived bearing the hallucinatory art of Skinner. Emperor of Sand, in 2017, presented a deathly sovereign painted by Alan Brown, also known as Medusawolf. Looked at together, those three records suggest an unofficial sequence of creature-fronted, non-Romano sleeves. The interpretation is ours, not a band-announced trilogy, and its third member complicates any neat musical grouping because Emperor of Sand returned to the grand narrative. But as a visual constellation it is persuasive: three presences staring out from three consecutive studio albums, each announcing that Mastodon's mythology could survive the loss of its familiar graphic language.
The current moment offers the inverse experiment. Marrow Deep returns to Romano's artwork while the music introduces guitarist Nick Johnston and keyboardist João Nogueira as substantial new creative voices. The older transition changed the image and the structural expectations while keeping the same four people. The newer transition changes the people while retaining an aesthetic continuity with the group's beginnings. Somewhere ahead lies the possibility of a further visual and musical transformation once the present touring cycle has had time to unfold. A new logo, a new painter, an entirely new creature or a return to elaborate fiction are imaginable possibilities, not confirmed plans. The point of the anniversary is that The Hunter taught us how to recognise a new Mastodon chapter before it had fully declared itself.
Before the rupture: the mountain in 2006
It helps to remember how unusual Mastodon already were before The Hunter. Remission, released in 2002, established a language of turbulent rhythms, dense guitar counterpoint and images that seemed to emerge from the pressure of the music itself. Leviathan, two years later, used Moby-Dick as a dramatic framework without surrendering the physical impact of the riffs. Blood Mountain went further: a fantastical ascent through hostile terrain, its songs crowded with wolves, strange forest beings, crystals, pursuits and metamorphoses. Its release on 12 September 2006 now belongs to the same anniversary season as The Hunter. Put the two records side by side and the five-year interval seems immense. One presents a continuous journey into a fable; the other opens a cabinet of separate, often incompatible objects.
Blood Mountain occupies a poignant position for listeners who saw the original four-piece as a singular chemistry. This was the group before the widely reported 2007 injury to Hinds, before the ordeal surrounding Crack the Skye, and long before anybody could know what the following two decades would ask of them. It is tempting to call this the last untouched version of the band, but such descriptions belong to the spectator's imagination. No one was living in a sealed and innocent period. The musicians had already known hardship, conflict and bereavement. Their personalities and personal circumstances were always changing. What Blood Mountain preserves is a particular musical equilibrium: Kelliher's exacting architecture, Sanders's mass and momentum, Dailor's astonishing rhythmic mobility and Hinds's unmistakable crooked melodic instinct, sounding as though they were competing in directions that somehow produced one organism.
Hinds's guitar was integral to that organism precisely because it did not appear to think in the same straight lines as the rest of it. Country and bluegrass inflections could catch against progressive-metal velocity; a bent phrase or strangely exposed note could make the riffs sound suddenly human. The music had room for virtuosity, but it rarely felt like an exercise in displaying difficulty. On a track such as "Sleeping Giant", wonder emerges from restraint as much as speed. On "Capillarian Crest", the interlocking guitar and drum patterns threaten to outrun the ground underneath them. "Bladecatcher" compresses disorientation into a miniature. Even the comparatively direct "Colony of Birchmen" makes space for Josh Homme's guest voice and the sense of a forest populated by ancient, unclassifiable presences. The record is a journey, but it also contains a miniature catalogue of future Mastodon possibilities.
The mountain's symbolism was more than decoration. In a 2009 interview, Kelliher described Blood Mountain's ascent as a metaphor for the band's move to Warner Bros. The mountain was the enormous institution they had reached, and the unanswered question was what waited at its summit. Read in 2026, the image becomes richer. An artistic career is never one summit. Each peak reveals another landscape, while the people climbing it do not remain the same as those who began below. The Hunter would eventually step away from the singular climb and allow the band to wander through several environments at once. It is the sound of four artists discovering that, after reaching one kind of elevation, they were free to choose a different direction.
There is an almost unnerving alignment in the dates. Blood Mountain arrived in mid-September 2006; the serious incident involving Hinds occurred in September 2007; The Hunter appeared at the end of September 2011. The proximity does not establish a single explanatory chain. It does make this month a recurring marker in the band's public history, a place where listeners can stand and look toward different versions of the same musicians. In the artwork of Blood Mountain, the journey still points upward. In The Hunter, the mountain has disappeared, replaced by a head whose interior cannot be seen. The visual change is as expressive as the musical one: the heroic expedition has become an encounter with something close, physical and unreadable.
An accident is not a biography
In the aftermath of the 2007 MTV Video Music Awards in Las Vegas, Hinds suffered a serious head injury and spent several days in a coma. In a contemporary Guardian interview published in March 2009, he described the vertigo he experienced during his recovery and his determination to keep playing guitar and attending band practice. The ordeal is part of the documented history of Crack the Skye. It affected the circumstances in which the next record was made, and Hinds's recollections of altered perception and near-death experience sit naturally beside that album's astral projections and journeys across the boundary of consciousness.
It would nevertheless be too simple to divide Brent Hinds into a beloved pre-accident figure and an inevitably deteriorating post-accident one. Such a picture turns a medical event into a complete theory of an individual, something the available public record does not support. The later problems described by his bandmates were real aspects of their relationship, as they have recounted them, and the 2007 injury was real too. Establishing a direct cause for every later conflict, musical difference or private difficulty would require knowledge an anniversary essay cannot honestly possess. The more useful observation is about what changed around the music: a band that had seemed to be climbing outward into ever more elaborate worlds was also working through a very frightening human event.
Crack the Skye is the proof that the years after the accident were capable of producing an extraordinary shared achievement. Released in March 2009, it follows an elaborate astral narrative involving a disabled protagonist, occult travel and imperial Russia, while carrying the memory of Dailor's sister Skye within its title and emotional architecture. Hinds's playing and writing remained central. His contributions gave the record much of its suspended, mournful and searching character. The album's famous expansiveness cannot be assigned to accident alone, because its other sources include the compositional aims and emotional histories of the entire group. It is enough to say that several kinds of rupture met inside it and became music.
The strain of performing that material also matters. Throughout the Crack the Skye cycle, Mastodon repeatedly played the album in full. Sanders subsequently described the undertaking as a layered and demanding journey. The songs required the band to hold a single complex structure together night after night, a formidable task for a group whose concerts were already physically intense. A band can love an ambitious work and still want to escape its architecture when it is time to make another one. The Hunter makes sense in that practical light. It was a response to the shape of an artistic process: after a long voyage through one carefully plotted story, the musicians wanted the right to write a song because the riff felt good, because the joke was ridiculous or because the sound opened a door.
That liberation is often mistaken for a retreat from the progressive imagination. A three-minute song can be a stranger object than a thirteen-minute suite. A collection without a governing plot can reveal more of a group's simultaneous personalities than a single narrative can accommodate. The Hunter does not ask the listener to forget Crack the Skye. It asks what four musicians might do when they stop trying to surpass it on its own terms. That decision contains a quiet artistic courage. They had arrived at a style critics and listeners admired; rather than produce a replica, they made a record that was rowdier, funnier, brighter, more abrupt and at times more openly wounded.
The other hunter: Brad Hinds
The title of the fifth album was not an abstract invitation to follow a creature through a forest. It was a dedication to Brad Hinds, Brent's brother, who died in a hunting accident in December 2010. The distinction matters because it explains why the record's mischievous surfaces contain a different emotional current. Its title track is a place of remembrance, and "The Sparrow" closes the album with a gentleness that lingers after the last of its more unruly songs. Contemporary reporting connected both pieces to Brent's loss. Dailor explained in a 2011 interview that it mattered to turn the terrible event into something beautiful for the family. The record's name is therefore a memorial carried on the front of a beast.
There is an almost unbearable inversion in that image now. In 2011, Brent was grieving his brother and continuing to make music with the other three men. In 2026, they are grieving Brent and continuing to make music without him. These are different losses under different circumstances, and it would be careless to treat one as a rehearsal for the other. Yet the old title has acquired a second resonance. It preserves a relationship within Brent's life at the very point when the listener is also remembering Brent himself. The music cannot be reduced to elegy, but its memorial purpose has grown with time.
To revisit "The Hunter" itself is to hear the album pause. After the muscular forward drive of its first six songs, the title track shifts toward an exposed, inward space. The voices feel less like commanders of a charging band and more like people standing at the edge of something they cannot mend. Notes are allowed to hang. The arrangement does not try to make sorrow efficient. Its position near the centre is important: the record's most explicit source of bereavement is not saved as a solemn final reveal. It interrupts the pleasure and strangeness that surround it, much as actual grief intrudes upon the rest of a life.
"The Sparrow" then places that loss at the very end without offering false resolution. It builds gradually from a fragile interior atmosphere to a broad, almost weightless release. It can sound hopeful and exhausted at once. This is one of Mastodon's recurring gifts: their endings often resist the idea that a difficult story has become simple just because the music has reached a final chord. The record's final movement allows the listener to imagine care travelling beyond an absence. Fifteen years later, that gesture connects with the new album's treatment of people no longer physically present. The personnel, sound and visual design may change; the impulse to preserve someone in a piece of music remains.
There is a reason The Hunter should not be called a full concept album simply because it bears a dedication. The band said in 2011 that it was a collection of distinct songs, not a lyrical retelling of Brad's death. That distinction gives the dedication its generosity. Brad is remembered within a work capable of laughter, invention and wildly different moods. His memory is allowed to coexist with the other parts of the musicians' lives. The album is not confined to a single emotion, because the person who inspired its name was a person and not a symbol.
Wood, colour, and a new face
Paul Romano's covers for the first four studio records gave Mastodon a visual language that felt ancient and intricate. His imagery could make a release resemble a found document from a civilization devoted to weather, animals and catastrophe. The covers offered continuity without merely repeating themselves. They also trained an audience to expect the next Mastodon album to look as if it belonged in the same expanding archive. The Hunter broke that continuity with startling confidence. AJ Fosik's sculpture, commonly identified as "Sad Demon Oath", supplied a frontal, multijawed creature assembled in coloured wood. The cover was not just an illustration of an animal; it was a photograph of a material object.
In 2011 the band made that materiality part of the introduction to the music. Footage of Fosik creating the sculpture accompanied the emergence of "Black Tongue". Viewers could watch a creature take shape through the accumulation of cut pieces and colour. The process connected the sleeve to labour, patience and the strangeness of making something enormous out of ordinary fragments. Even the promotional packaging offered an augmented-reality component, a very 2011 attempt to make an album cover escape its flat surface. The underlying artistic idea survives the period technology: the creature was intended to enter the physical world before the listener entered its music.
A mask is both an image and a promise. It tells us something is alive behind it while refusing to tell us exactly what. Fosik's beast operates in this way. There are echoes of folk art, ritual objects, carnival colour and biological impossibility, but the image does not decode into one character with a settled backstory. Its face can be understood without a written mythology. This was precisely the liberation the music needed. A record that declined a single narrative could still have one strong visual identity. The artwork acted like a coat of arms for thirteen unrelated encounters.
The change of artist also tells us something about the band's approach to its own continuity. In contemporary interviews Dailor and Sanders made clear that the departure from Romano was intentional and was part of a broader freshening of the project. New producer, new visual collaborator, different writing method: The Hunter was consciously designed as a distinct cycle. Today we can see that the decision did not sever the group's earlier world. Romano later returned for Hushed and Grim and, in 2026, for Marrow Deep. An aesthetic language can be set aside and recovered. For a group whose artwork is nearly as recognisable as its music, that is a useful precedent as another generation of material begins.
The original face remains difficult to replace in memory. It is at once menacing and oddly ceremonial, a creature that seems to occupy a shallow pocket of cosmic space. Against the darker, narrative sleeves that preceded it, Fosik's colour feels like an opening. Against the knowledge of Brad Hinds's death, those many jaws take on an entirely different function: the monster is a guardian of grief, a loud object protecting a quiet subject. It is an image of the album's dual life. The Hunter wanted to have fun again, and it carried a dead brother's name into the world while doing so.
A record that changes the weather every few minutes
The most effective way to understand The Hunter is to follow its changes of weather rather than demand that each song behave as a chapter in a hidden novel. The sequence is a sequence of moods, surfaces and tempos. It can resemble a small exhibition curated by people who have shared one rehearsal room for years but retain fiercely distinct imaginations. That is why its brevity feels so consequential. Crack the Skye needed time to deliver us from one end of its mythology to the other. The Hunter has more than a dozen separate arrivals and departures in just under an hour. The spaces between tracks become little resets of perspective.
"Black Tongue" is an ideal opening because it sounds unmistakably like Mastodon and yet tells the listener that the terms have changed. Its initial riff has the weight of machinery starting up, while the drums immediately complicate any attempt to settle into a conventional rock pulse. Kelliher's guitar leads the way through an arrangement that is compact without being plain. Hinds's more wayward melodic language is still available within the ensemble, but the song does not need a long expository passage to establish its identity. It behaves like a front door: recognisable materials, no unnecessary corridor. The video of Fosik assembling the cover creature made the song itself feel like an act of construction, one shaped wooden fragment striking the next.
Then comes "Curl of the Burl", whose sludgy, almost swaggering groove is part of the record's announcement that fun and heaviness need not compete. The song's title refers to the growths on trees prized by woodworkers, and its narrative world involves destructive and absurd human behaviour around forests and addiction. Dailor conceived the music video's improbable horror-comedy scenario, which director Robert Schober brought to life. The band's willingness to be ridiculous is sometimes overlooked in retrospective descriptions of its solemn achievements. Yet that willingness had been there in its peculiar creatures, wordplay and deliberately impossible story premises for years. On The Hunter it became easier to hear because no single epic was waiting to discipline the joke.
"Blasteroid" makes the next turn with little ceremony. Its attack is brief, sharp and joyously unreasonable, the sound of riffs escaping a container that had been sealed during the Crack the Skye years. Kelliher said in 2011 that some faster and heavier ideas had remained in a riff collection while the previous record took its particular form. The Hunter gave those ideas somewhere to live. That history dispels the tidy notion that the album was a sudden attempt to become a simpler rock band. It was partly an opportunity to recover music the members had already wanted to make. The record's apparent change of direction was also an act of remembering.
"Stargasm" is one of the keys to the entire project. Its title is at once proudly silly and cosmically suggestive, a description that could apply to much of Mastodon's imaginative life. The music opens a drifting, psychedelic space inside an otherwise muscular album. The voices seem to move through the arrangement rather than merely ride above it, and the melodic atmosphere points toward retro-futurist science fiction. Dailor mentioned Barbarella when discussing its inspiration in a 2011 interview. It is possible to hear the song as the record's reminder that abandoning one long science-fiction narrative did not mean abandoning outer space. Instead the stars appear suddenly, for the duration of one song, without being obliged to explain how they relate to the trees, the hunters or the next creature in the sequence.
The title "Octopus Has No Friends" sounds like an absurdist children's story encountered during a sleepless night, but the playing is fiercely assured. Dailor's restless internal movement gives the piece its elastic feel, a syncopated intelligence refusing to let the guitar figure become ordinary. This is where the usual division between experimental Mastodon and accessible Mastodon collapses. The chorus may be immediate and the form readily grasped, yet the texture remains full of strange decisions. Accessibility is a quality of the listening experience, not proof that the musicians have stopped asking difficult rhythmic questions. The Hunter makes the distinction audible over and over again.
"All the Heavy Lifting" carries a title that might describe the band's working life. The song combines direct momentum with intricate detail, its heavier passages answering melodic reaches that feel increasingly open. By the time it reaches its later sections, the composition has begun to stretch beyond the compact statement implied by the opening run of the album. It occupies the boundary between the old appetite for extended structure and the new desire for song-sized releases. Rather than erase the past, Mastodon placed it in a different proportion. A listener can hear echoes of the elaborate band of 2009 inside music that has no need to imitate the exact shape of a 2009 song.
The title track brings the centre of gravity down. It contains grief, tenderness and a recognition of limits. The details of Brad's death belong to his family, not to the interpretive appetite of strangers. The music itself offers plenty to contemplate without converting the song into a diagnosis of its author. Hinds's voice and guitar are meaningful because of their musical presence in that moment: an instrument capable of distortion and violence becomes an instrument capable of vulnerability. Sanders's participation makes the track feel communal rather than like a private lament accidentally issued under a band name. The two voices carry different grain, which is one of the important aesthetic facts of this record. Mastodon were becoming increasingly comfortable allowing several singers to inhabit the same emotional landscape.
"Dry Bone Valley" pushes us back toward motion with a skeletal, almost theatrical flavour. Its contours have the quality of a dangerous pursuit sketched quickly, enough detail to suggest a landscape and enough propulsion to prevent us from settling there. As with other songs on the record, the imagery is suggestive rather than obedient to a master plot. The piece has a companionable place among the earlier mountain's wolves and monsters, but it does not require the listener to consult a map. The freedom is instructive. Mastodon could retain every bit of their taste for grotesque fantasy while permitting an image to last four minutes and then vanish.
"Thickening" is among the record's most revealing turns, not because it settles the question of what Mastodon had become, but because it refuses to settle. The rhythm is slower and stranger, the guitars leaving larger pockets of air around their shapes. Hinds's melodic personality, with its sideways blues and country-derived instinct, is particularly valuable in this kind of environment. The piece makes no apology for its lopsided gait. To call it an interlude would miss the fact that it is one of the strongest demonstrations of the album's approach: the band can move into a half-lit room, rearrange the furniture and leave before the listener has fully named the atmosphere. There are other futures hiding in this record than the straight-ahead rock future sometimes assigned to it.
The opening of "Creature Lives" creates one of the discography's oddest theatrical spaces. Its early ambience allows a listener to wonder whether a song has started at all; then a broad, communal melodic idea emerges. Dailor wrote and sang the piece, an important marker in his growing role as a lead voice within the group. There is a deliberately almost childlike directness to it, particularly after the ferocious detail of the preceding tracks. In that directness lies another kind of risk. The band that could play almost anything had to resist using complexity to protect a simple melody. The result is an unlikely anthem, as though the animal on the cover has stepped away from menace and is asking to be recognised as a living thing.
"Spectrelight" snaps back with a severe, rapid charge, and Scott Kelly's guest contribution locates it within the group's older heavy-music friendships. The track is a reminder that The Hunter did not abandon extremity. The band might have reached a larger audience and found a stronger taste for memorable choruses, but it remained capable of carving a short passage into something abrasive and unforgiving. The contrast with "Creature Lives" is deliberately startling. An album of separate songs can alter its governing laws between one track and the next; The Hunter uses that privilege so that sweetness and punishment stand close enough to intensify one another.
"Bedazzled Fingernails" almost advertises its own eccentricity. It has a compressed and angular energy, all sharp corners, layered voices and the sense that an elaborate mechanism has been squeezed into a song barely longer than three minutes. Its title resists solemn explanation, which is a gift on a record retrospectively overburdened by the idea that every detail must signify crisis. Sometimes Mastodon's creative personality is expressed in the decision to call a piece of intricate heavy rock "Bedazzled Fingernails". The absurd language and the craft are of a piece. A band should be permitted both.
Finally, "The Sparrow" returns us to open air. The pace relaxes, the melodic figures are patient, and the drums help the music widen almost imperceptibly. Nothing needs to be announced as a conclusion to the preceding dozen episodes. A piece associated with the memory of Brad Hinds can serve as the emotional final word even though the album is not a concept story about him. Its structure seems built around the permission to keep moving while retaining what has been lost. This is why the song can produce a complicated response in 2026. It belongs to Brent's grief in 2011, to the original four-piece's chemistry, and now to the listener's sense of a musician no longer present. The musical recording has not changed; the world around the recording has.
Taken as a whole, the album's first and last notes frame a journey from a constructed creature to an open horizon. Between them lies a working demonstration of the group's plural nature. Kelliher's weight and precision, Hinds's unpredictability, Sanders's mass and Dailor's restless invention could be concentrated into shorter forms without becoming generic. Their work did not require a single governing storyline to become recognisably theirs. In 2011 that was a new proposition. In 2026, as a different set of people negotiate what Mastodon can be, it feels like a practical lesson from the band's own past.
A fifth element with no map
The Hunter belongs to the period in which fans enjoyed describing Mastodon's first four albums as an elemental cycle: fire, water, earth and ether or air, depending on which member was asked and which interpretation one preferred. The band themselves treated that system with some playfulness. In a long 2011 interview, Hinds suggested getting out of one's element, Sanders pointed to the absence of a single theme, and Dailor entertained the idea that wood might be the operative element. The answer was intentionally unstable. An elaborate conceptual tradition had created an expectation the musicians were now enjoying the right to frustrate.
Wood is a better description of this transition than it initially sounds. It is the material of the cover creature, the setting of the burl story, the substance of carved objects and the trace of an organic world carried into a technological age. Wood grows in uneven rings; it absorbs accidents of weather; a flaw can become the very pattern that makes a craftsman want to work with it. The album's thirteen songs are similarly distinct growths from shared roots. None needs to explain the existence of the others. Their association is material and familial, the fact that the same four people made them at the same particular time.
That organic metaphor also helps to distinguish experiment from length. The Hunter experiments with the ratio of song to suite, with vocal placement, with how much humour the band allows onto the surface, with the distance between harshness and warmth, and with whether an album needs a single central myth. A progressive instinct can operate inside a compact song just as it can inside an enormous composition. A group does not become static by writing a chorus; it becomes static when it stops discovering what a chorus, a riff or a texture might accomplish. The music of The Hunter often sounds like four highly technical players trying to recover the pleasure of surprise.
The producer change is part of that story. Mike Elizondo, whose work extended well beyond metal, came in for the album, while recording took place across Sound City in California and Doppler in Atlanta. The new process allowed a different balance between musical detail and directness. The group did not sound domesticated. Its aggression remained rough-edged and its rhythms still refused easy confinement. But there was a greater willingness to let a strong idea present itself without a surrounding explanatory apparatus. It is interesting that in 2026, another changed line-up has worked with producers from distinct worlds, Patrik Berger and Kurt Ballou, while pursuing an album meant to hold both difficult experiences and renewed energy. The practical circumstances differ, but the appetite for outside voices is another recurring Mastodon habit.
The commercial story can be told without suggesting that chart placement explains the music. The Hunter reached the American top ten, extending the group's reach, and "Curl of the Burl" proved a durable point of entry for listeners who might not first have found them through "Hearts Alive" or "The Last Baron". Accessibility altered how people discovered Mastodon, and perhaps what they imagined Mastodon to be. Longstanding listeners who preferred the complete conceptual journeys could experience the album as a challenge to their expectations. Newcomers could hear it as the natural centre of the catalogue. Both responses reveal something about the unusual position of a band whose complexity was always bound to a powerful physical groove.
Fifteen years later, the old debate over whether The Hunter should have been another Crack the Skye seems less compelling than the fact that it deliberately was not. The record made future variation possible. Without it, the following albums might have looked like a choice between repeating the great mythic period and abandoning the qualities that made that period singular. The Hunter showed another route: take the musicians' shared identity as the continuity, then let production, artwork, songwriting scale and lyrical structure mutate. An era had ended; the creature emerging from the wood had not yet revealed how many subsequent shapes it could assume.
Three faces, three worlds
The succession of The Hunter, Once More 'Round the Sun and Emperor of Sand forms a visual sequence compelling enough to earn an informal name. One could call it the beast-head trilogy, or, more precisely, the non-Romano sequence. These descriptions are interpretive conveniences, not official Mastodon terminology. They matter because album artwork creates a visual memory that can operate independently of musical and lyrical categories. When someone looks along the spines of these three releases, the recurrence of highly charged, confrontational figures suggests an era in which the band repeatedly asked a new artist to place a new being at the threshold.
Fosik's The Hunter creature is sculptural and frontal. Skinner's work for Once More 'Round the Sun, released in June 2014, explodes outward into psychedelic colour and grotesque, almost ceremonial complexity. Its central presence feels caught inside a larger ecology of multiplying forms. Alan Brown's Medusawolf art for Emperor of Sand, released in March 2017, turns the figure toward allegory: an armoured, skeletal sovereign presiding over the desert and suggesting disease and death. Three beasts, three ways of personifying a world. Wood gives way to painted psychedelic proliferation, which gives way to the wasteland's ruler. The move from creature to creature is more useful than an attempt to force the music into a neat trilogy of identical intentions.
The musical difference of the third record is essential. Emperor of Sand restored a sustained conceptual arc, telling the story of a condemned traveller through an imaginative terrain informed by experiences of cancer among people close to the band. Dailor explained that the cover's monster represented cancer given a humanoid form, a power capable of killing without moral awareness. The return to concept meant The Hunter's experiment had worked in the most liberating way: it gave the band permission to change back. They could make shorter, standalone songs in 2011 and 2014 without surrendering the right to construct a full narrative in 2017. No previous mode had been invalidated.
There is another layer in the typography. The earlier Romano-era visual identity had established a family resemblance through ornate lettering and accompanying imagery. The Hunter's stark graphic break made that resemblance newly visible by its absence. Once More 'Round the Sun pushed the colour and design into a different register. Emperor of Sand mixed a more classical, imposing title treatment with a mythic figure, suggesting a partial return to the old theatrical weight even while the painter remained different. The exact name of a font is less important than the changing relationship between word and beast: title as emblem, title as psychedelic adornment, title as inscription on a fallen kingdom.
That the group would later return to Romano makes these detours richer. Hushed and Grim's austere cover and Marrow Deep's newly abundant colour show how a longstanding visual collaborator can speak in several tones. The three non-Romano records therefore occupy a distinct shelf in a catalogue whose art is less an unbroken brand than a conversation between continuity and discontinuity. The Hunter began that conversation. It made a new cover artist seem like a creative statement rather than a marketing adjustment. When we imagine a different artist making the sleeve of a future album, we are not imposing an alien ambition on Mastodon. We are remembering one of their proven methods of beginning again.
The long road through the years between
A fifteenth anniversary risks compressing the middle years into a single arrow, as if The Hunter announced a direction and the band dutifully followed it until the next great rupture. The actual catalogue is less obedient. Once More 'Round the Sun is melodic and direct in places, but also baroque, anxious and musically peculiar. Emperor of Sand reinstated a narrative quest. The 2017 EP Cold Dark Place isolated another aspect of the group's sensibility, its wounded, exploratory side, with Hinds's voice and guitar especially conspicuous. The art continued to admit personal reality through fiction, and the musicians continued to change the proportions of their shared sound. A new era is rarely a permanent style. It is a period in which several possibilities can become visible.
The Hunter's place in that succession is therefore foundational but not tyrannical. It established that a Mastodon album could be a collection of individual rooms, each finished on its own terms. Once More 'Round the Sun took that possibility toward a more elaborate, vividly painted collection. Emperor of Sand showed that the older narrative instrument was still in working order. Hushed and Grim, released in October 2021, approached the album as a much larger landscape again, with a double album's space for grief, texture, detours and conflicting emotional tempos. Its subject was shaped by the death of the band's longtime manager Nick John in 2018. With Romano's largely monochromatic visual treatment, it also looked backward toward a lineage that The Hunter had temporarily interrupted.
What the listener cannot see from the album spines is the human difficulty of sustaining any long-running collaboration. Four people who create a distinctive art together still have separate memories, needs, habits and private lives. Their ability to sound inseparable on a recording does not mean every rehearsal or tour is harmonious. Hinds's departure in March 2025 and his death in a motorcycle collision that August have altered the way the preceding catalogue is heard. The accounts subsequently offered by the remaining musicians describe relationships that had become deeply strained and a loss they found devastating. Those accounts are theirs; they deserve to be treated as first-hand perspectives rather than converted into a simple omniscient account of everybody's motives.
The public history contains love and pain, disagreement and irreversibility. An anniversary feature need not pretend those elements can be reconciled by a clever retrospective thesis. To commemorate Brent is to make room for the guitar phrases, vocal grain, odd humour and musical daring that are present in the records, while allowing the history of the people behind them to remain complex. There is no useful reason to listen to the title track of The Hunter as though it foretold every later event. It did not. Its significance is that it captured a person in a living act of creative expression and preserved a moment in which the band answered one loss together.
That preservation is what recordings do so strangely well. On Blood Mountain the four original members are still making the ascent, forever reaching toward the next impossible landscape. On Crack the Skye they are forever navigating an elaborately imagined universe. On The Hunter they are forever standing around a new creature, trying on shorter songs and letting themselves be amused. Subsequent history changes how the observer approaches those fixed moments. It cannot remove the openness the musicians possessed while making them. If anything, the knowledge of how vulnerable an era can be ought to make us listen for the life it contained, rather than search every track for a warning of how it would end.
The mathematics of a return
An anniversary makes a peculiar instrument of time. To the person who made a record, the years between release and commemoration contain innumerable ordinary days: travel, work, illness, jokes, arguments, births, funerals and periods when nothing seems to happen. To the listener standing at the other end, the dates can align with almost astronomical neatness. September 2006, September 2011, September 2026: twenty years, fifteen years, a new release only one month old. The mind naturally arranges these points into an orbit. They are not evidence of a cosmic mechanism. They are an unusually useful vantage from which to appreciate how often Mastodon have used imagined worlds to process real changes in human time.
The group has written about journeys across seas, mountains, astral planes and deserts. The space between one album and another can be understood as a journey of its own, though its terrain consists of people changing. In 2011, the distance from Blood Mountain was five years and from the Las Vegas injury roughly four. The listener could hear a band beginning again without knowing what those years would look like from the distance of 2026. Today, Marrow Deep is close enough that its future is still largely unwritten. The old album supplies a reminder that new beginnings do not announce all their consequences on release day. We give the future an outline because we want to see it, but the world ahead has not yet been carved.
The fifteenth anniversary also falls just after the first anniversary of Brent's death, making the encounter with The Hunter more charged than a routine celebratory replay. The album does not contain knowledge of that later event. What it contains is a document of four people meeting grief with art, and a record of what their shared creativity could do when the rules of a previous cycle were loosened. The cosmic feeling comes from hearing that older moment alongside another set of musicians doing their own version of the same work. An album called The Hunter, dedicated to one lost brother, becomes newly legible beside an album dedicated in part to the brother the band has now lost. The resonance is real even though it does not imply that fate had written an ending in advance.
There is comfort in allowing these periods to retain their separate identities. The Hunter is not secretly Marrow Deep, and Marrow Deep is not a correction to The Hunter. Each belongs to the people who made it and to the historical conditions under which it became possible. Their connection is a pattern of response: make an image large enough to hold difficult feeling, bring a number of creative voices into the same room, and discover a new form on the other side. That is a more enduring symmetry than any numerical anniversary could offer on its own.
Marrow Deep: another door opens
The ninth Mastodon studio album arrived on 28 August 2026 through Loma Vista Recordings, nearly five years after Hushed and Grim. Its new line-up brings together Sanders, Kelliher and Dailor with guitarist Nick Johnston and keyboardist João Nogueira. The album carries the grief of Hinds's death and Dailor's mother Michele Lawrence's death in February 2025. Its mythology draws on the Three Fates, the figures who spin, measure and cut the thread of life. That subject is almost unbearably suited to this anniversary: fifteen years after an album named for a man who died while hunting, the band presents an album preoccupied with the thread connecting one life to another, and with how suddenly it can be severed.
The resemblance between the two records should not obscure their opposite starting conditions. The Hunter was made by the established four-piece after a demanding conceptual album. It offered a release from an artistic form and introduced a new visual collaborator. Marrow Deep is the first studio document of a five-piece after a rupture in the membership, and its cover brings Paul Romano back into the centre of the artwork. In one case, the human chemistry remained continuous as the presentation changed. In the other, the change in human chemistry is profound, and an older visual voice helps make the new work part of the larger history. Each album asks what Mastodon can retain while becoming different.
There is something moving in the fact that the group did not set the old mythology aside when circumstances became difficult. The new album's narrative language refers to fate, threads, ghosts and the persistence of relationships. Its guests also form bridges across time. Josh Homme returns to a Mastodon recording after appearing on Blood Mountain's "Colony of Birchmen" in 2006. Neil Fallon, heard on "Blood and Thunder" during the Leviathan period, appears again. Geezer Butler contributes to "The Vanishing", a particularly meaningful collaboration given Dailor's description of his mother's affection for Black Sabbath. The album does not imitate the old records by inviting those musicians back. It uses a recognisable family of artistic relationships to speak from a changed present.
The contribution of Johnston and Nogueira is crucial. Johnston brings a distinct lead-guitar vocabulary, while Nogueira's keyboards can operate as atmosphere, melody and a second source of movement. Their presence gives the band new combinations rather than asking any one musician to perform a facsimile of Hinds. The original trio still supplies familiar forces: Kelliher's sculpted riffing, Sanders's low-centred vocal and instrumental weight, and Dailor's rhythmic imagination. Yet those forces now interact with additional personalities. The result is most interesting when it lets the listener hear the band discovering the new arrangement in real time, not when it tries to reassure us that everything is exactly as it was.
In an interview published by Kerrang! in July 2026, Dailor described having hoped that the next album might return to writing about creatures such as Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster. Instead, recent events placed more immediate material in front of him. That observation is one of the clearest grounds for thinking about what may happen beyond this touring cycle. The urge toward fantastic, self-contained invention has not disappeared. It was deferred by what the musicians felt they needed to say. The Hunter's history shows that deferral need not become permanent: in 2011, the band emerged from an emotionally and technically demanding project by giving different ideas permission to coexist.
Dailor has also pointed to the instrumental interplay between Johnston and Nogueira near the conclusion of "The Three Fates" as a sign of what the new configuration may be able to do. That is a more substantial clue than any prediction about a sleeve or logo. An unfamiliar lead voice and a keyboardist who can carry a melodic conversation create new routes through the music. The next album could make those routes stranger, longer, quieter or more rhythmically unpredictable. Whatever happens, the potential is evident in musicians who have not yet exhausted the possibilities of playing together.
The immediate practical reality is that Marrow Deep has only recently been released. It deserves the time required for songs to acquire live lives, for the five musicians to develop further reflexes onstage, and for the material to settle in listeners' memories. Any description of the following album's date, producer, art or complete narrative would be speculation. Yet it is reasonable to hear the current record as an opening statement rather than a final answer. The Hunter also took time to reveal itself. In September 2011, no listener knew exactly how its visual and structural innovations would echo through the subsequent releases. Fifteen years later, we can recognise the moment precisely because we have lived through what followed.
The possibility of a stranger next chapter
The most enticing question in 2026 concerns the first album that the present line-up might make after its initial act of memorial and renewal. Marrow Deep's emotional obligations are particular. It has had to speak about lost relationships, acknowledge an absent foundational musician and introduce a new configuration without disguising any of those facts. The next record may begin with a different kind of freedom. Dailor's comments about wanting to return to monsters and imaginative stories are an invitation to consider an album whose world is designed primarily from fascination, play and curiosity, rather than from the immediate necessity of bereavement. Nothing about that prospect would make its emotions superficial. Mastodon's fantastic subjects have often been ways of approaching difficult realities indirectly.
The idea of a return to an experimental space needs a generous definition of experiment. It might mean a continuous myth in the tradition of Blood Mountain or Crack the Skye. It could mean an odd collection in the spirit of The Hunter, with music that moves between compact riff songs, psychedelic interludes and tracks that refuse conventional length. It might mean giving Nogueira's keyboards a more structural role, allowing Johnston's melodic language to lead unfamiliar harmonic excursions, or making the rhythm section converse with those parts in a way it has not yet tried. A new era is not validated by being more complicated than the last. It is validated, artistically, when the musicians find a form adequate to what they want to discover.
There is already a fascinating compositional problem waiting for them. Hinds's particular way of bending a melody against the underlying heaviness was one of Mastodon's identifying features. It should remain part of the history, neither erased nor treated as a role that can simply be assigned to a replacement. Johnston's individuality is therefore an opportunity. A new line-up becomes persuasive through interaction: the old musicians respond differently because the new players ask different questions. Keyboard textures can turn an angular riff into a huge, suspended environment; a lead line can draw unexpected attention to Dailor's subdivisions; a strong melodic voice can make Sanders's gruffer singing or Dailor's clear tenor sound different by contrast. The next record can expand this vocabulary without pretending it has arrived in a vacuum.
The Hunter supplies an especially useful model for the graphic possibilities. It changed producer and cover artist, moved outside a familiar visual family, and announced its independence with an object whose material construction was visible. One can imagine the next chapter doing something similarly decisive. A fresh logo could announce that the five-piece has reached the point of defining its own symbolic world. A new cover artist could introduce an unfamiliar mythological vocabulary. A wholly new graphic system could transform how a Mastodon record sits beside the earlier sleeves. These are possibilities, and my own expectation is that some kind of decisive visual shift would suit an album arriving after the Marrow Deep cycle. There is no public confirmation of a new logo, designer or timetable.
The return of Romano on Marrow Deep strengthens rather than weakens the possibility of an eventual departure. His paintings have given the band continuity at moments when continuity matters. A future commission from a different artist would not require rejecting that history. The Hunter showed how an artistic change can honour a lineage by revealing that the lineage is still alive and therefore capable of variation. Art becomes lifeless when all its signs are maintained merely because an audience recognises them. Mastodon have generally preferred to let their signs undergo the same mutations as the sound.
What might such an object look like? The question should remain open. The beast-head sequence offers precedent but not obligation. The next cover may have no face at all. It may be a landscape, a diagram, a woodcut, a painting of impossible architecture or an object built by hand and photographed, as Fosik's sculpture was. It could return to a narrative scene more explicitly than anything since Emperor of Sand. Imagining all those possibilities is part of the pleasure of living at the beginning of a cycle. The fifteen-year-old cover tells us that the most effective new face is the one nobody could have confidently described before it arrived.
The same humility applies to the musical future. A record that returns to cosmic experimentation would be welcomed by listeners who treasure the band's labyrinthine mythology, but it need not recreate Crack the Skye. That album's precise circumstances, people and accidents of inspiration cannot be manufactured again. The creative lesson of The Hunter is the right to make the next record unlike the last. In 2011 that meant placing "Curl of the Burl" and "Creature Lives" alongside "The Hunter" and "The Sparrow". In the coming years it may mean allowing a new five-piece to write the strangest thing it can imagine without having to prove that it is the old four-piece in disguise.
The logo as a small history of survival
A band's logo can seem like the least interesting detail of its music until the logo changes. Then an entire world can look suddenly different. Logos appear on tickets, stage backdrops, shirts, drumheads and the corner of an album cover; they are repeated so often that they become a kind of visual voice. Mastodon's different treatments of their name belong to the listener's memory of the records just as much as the covers themselves. The rougher early identity, the ornate mythic presentation, the assertive shift around The Hunter and later returns to classical-looking lettering all tell a story about how the band wished to be encountered at particular times.
That is why the speculation about another new logo after Marrow Deep has some emotional force. A graphic mark would recognise the new five-piece as an ongoing band rather than a temporary live arrangement built around the old songs. It could do so while leaving every earlier design intact, preserved on the records that used it. The logo on The Hunter did not rewrite the cover of Blood Mountain. It drew a line around a different stretch of time. An eventual new design could perform the same function for the present musicians, allowing an era to declare itself without requesting that fans forget its predecessors.
The idea of the non-Romano trilogy also becomes more interesting when regarded as one stage in this longer visual grammar. Between the dense early mythologies and the later returns to Romano, the three creature-fronted records offered a succession of alternative faces. Their covers were made by different artists and belonged to music with different formal ambitions. They are related through the band's willingness to commission a powerful, specific imagination each time. Rather than identify an official narrative that does not exist, the unofficial trilogy points to a practice: invite a maker into the band's world, give the music a distinct physical counterpart, and allow that object to change how the audience hears the songs.
The artist chosen for a future project will matter because Mastodon's best sleeves have not functioned as decoration. They have given the records a body. Fosik's sculpture made The Hunter feel carved and assembled, Skinner's paintings made Once More 'Round the Sun feel as if it had erupted into an overloaded psychic carnival, and Medusawolf's emperor gave the 2017 album a figure through which to contemplate the cruelty of disease. Romano's Marrow Deep turns colour and symbolism toward a new configuration of grief, memory and continuity. An artist capable of giving the next music its own body will be contributing to the composition of the era, even without playing a note.
There is a temptation to treat a rebrand as evidence that change has been completed. Music is slower than that. A new symbol may be announced in one afternoon, while a band can spend years learning what its new members make possible. The Hunter's visual transformation is easy to date because its release is fixed. The artistic transformation it marked had begun earlier, in rehearsal rooms, on long tours and in the decision to stop demanding one continuous storyline. The future new look, if there is one, may similarly arrive as the visible outcome of a musical process already under way. The emblem appears at the door after the creature has spent a long time growing in the dark.
What remains of the original four
It is possible to celebrate the changed group in 2026 and still acknowledge that the original four-person chemistry cannot recur. Hinds's absence is neither a minor arrangement change nor a reason to deny the work the others continue making. He was a founding musician whose contributions helped define Mastodon's writing, sound and public imagination for a quarter of a century. He was also one person in a collaboration that required Sanders, Kelliher and Dailor, each with a distinctive creative voice. The surviving musicians' decision to continue is part of their own history. The recordings give us room to hold both truths without forcing them into an argument about who owns a memory.
In fact, The Hunter may be especially well suited to that kind of listening. It is full of distinct voices trading space, and it documents a period when the four-person organism could expand its proportions without ceasing to be one band. The directness of some songs gives the players nowhere to hide; the more unusual tracks reveal how many stylistic instincts could coexist. It is a collective record with an individual memorial at its heart. To celebrate it properly is to hear all four players, and to remember Brad Hinds without turning Brent's later death into the explanation for every earlier note.
The temptation to identify a single moment when everything began to come apart is understandable in the wake of an irreversible loss. Human beings search backward for a warning, an origin, a point at which another choice might have altered the ending. The 2007 accident is a powerful candidate because its date is known and its seriousness documented. Yet history is rarely that legible. There were many years of music after it, many acts of collaboration, and whole records that would not exist without those years. Reducing that period to a slow descent would obscure the very achievement this anniversary invites us to commemorate. The Hunter is not the sound of a band merely surviving a past injury. It is the sound of musicians making a deliberate and unusually inventive album in the present tense of 2011.
The same standard should apply to Marrow Deep. Its creation followed an awful period for the musicians, but the record should be permitted to exist as music rather than only as a public statement about loss. Its riffs, its new instrumental conversations, its shifts between heaviness and spaciousness, and the peculiar energy of a changed studio room are artistic facts. As the songs become part of a live repertoire, listeners will hear details that were not obvious at release. They will build memories around performances, as earlier generations built memories around "Black Tongue" or "Stargasm". An era becomes real through that accumulation, not merely through an announcement that a new era has begun.
Fifteen years, and the opening of the mouth
There is a beautiful temporal mismatch in returning to The Hunter today. The record still sounds like a declaration of freedom, even though it carries Brad's loss. Its cover still looks like a strange object being introduced to the world, even though it is now an established icon in the band's catalogue. Hinds is audibly alive inside it, just as the other three musicians are audibly younger versions of themselves. The songs continue moving forward at the speed they did in 2011, independent of the intervening years. Listening is a way of entering that fixed time without pretending we can live there.
The anniversary also permits a wider view. Blood Mountain turned twenty earlier this month. Its ascent, its animal encounters and the ornate imagination of the pre-2007 four-piece remain vivid. Crack the Skye still hangs between personal grief and a gigantic imaginary cosmos. The Hunter sits immediately beyond it with the audacity to be both smaller and stranger. In the years after, the music would move through psychedelic colour, an emperor's wasteland, intimate darkness and a double album of mourning. Now the band has reached Marrow Deep and stands at the beginning of another working relationship. The catalogue resembles a system of orbiting worlds rather than a straight road from one supposedly definitive style to another.
To look at The Hunter's beast head from 2026 is to see it as a doorway in that system. On one side lies the era in which the same four men pursued enormous consecutive mythologies; on the other lies a period of greater formal mobility, new graphic collaborators and recurring choices about how much of the emotional life should be carried by fiction. The doorway does not guarantee a happy passage. It does remind us that a band can honour what has been made without staying inside its forms. There may be another such doorway ahead, perhaps after the current album has completed its live cycle and the five musicians have learned what only they can play together.
If the next Mastodon sleeve carries a new logo and the image of a creature none of us has yet imagined, the resemblance will be welcome. If it retains Romano's hand, or presents no creature at all, the deeper parallel may still hold. The Hunter's true legacy is not a mandatory graphic style or a requirement to write short songs. It is the idea that change can be an expression of continuity, that an artist's identity is found in the choices it makes under new conditions. Mastodon have already demonstrated that principle once, and their present configuration gives them the chance to test it again.
For today, the future can remain unfinished. We have the beast in the doorway, the brother whose name it bears, the four players whose work animates it, and the sound of a band finding a new shape at the end of a demanding road. Fifteen years later, the jaws still seem open. Beyond them is not a single predetermined story, but an expanse of possible worlds.
The hunter is gone, and the music remains. The next creature has not yet shown its face.
SOURCES AND EDITORIAL NOTE
The essay is an original anniversary interpretation grounded in contemporary interviews, original release listings and 2026 reporting. The suggested “beast-head” or non-Romano trilogy is a visual reading, not an official album cycle. A future logo, visual collaborator, musical direction and release timetable are possibilities, not announcements. Hinds’s 2007 injury is documented; no medical claim about the cause of later personal or band difficulties is made.
01 Apple Music, The Hunter (album listing). 27 September 2011 release date, original thirteen-track sequence and release credits.
02 Apple Music, Blood Mountain (album listing). 2006 release context and original album sequence.
03 The Guardian, “Blood, sweat and beards”. 27 March 2009; contemporary account of the 2007 injury and Crack the Skye context.
04 Louder / Metal Hammer, “Mastodon: The Hunter archive album interview”. 2011-era interviews, preserved online; working process, concept decision, Brad Hinds and wood imagery.
05 Louder, “The Hunter: Mastodon’s transit from triumph to tragedy and back”. Retrospective on recording, visual changes and the dedication.
06 Pitchfork, “New Mastodon: ‘Black Tongue’”. 26 July 2011; release announcement and Fosik sculpture video.
07 Loudwire, “Mastodon Drummer on ‘Curl of the Burl’ Video”. 23 September 2011; Dailor on the video's conception.
08 Trafficbeat / Mike Ragogna, “A Conversation with Brann Dailor of Mastodon”. 18 November 2011; contemporary description of the abandoned overarching concept.
09 Blabbermouth, “Mastodon Cover Artist Skinner Talks About Inspiration”. 22 May 2014; Once More 'Round the Sun visual history.
10 Revolver, “Mastodon's Emperor of Sand: Brann Dailor Talks Harrowing Concept Album”. 12 May 2017; Medusawolf artwork and the cancer allegory.
11 Kerrang!, “Mastodon: Underneath the grief, there is a sea of gratitude”. 15 July 2026; interviews with Dailor, Sanders and Kelliher; mythology, new players and the future.
12 SPIN, “Mastodon Enters New Era on Marrow Deep”. 13 July 2026; record release, label change and new line-up.
13 The Soundcheck, “‘From Mozart To Madonna’: Troy Sanders Chats Influences”. 2026 interview; Romano’s Marrow Deep cover and the visual brief.
14 Rolling Stone Australia, “Troy Sanders Talks Mastodon’s Most Important Record”. 28 August 2026; release-day perspective on Marrow Deep.
15 Pitchfork, “Mastodon: Marrow Deep Album Review”. 31 August 2026; musical context and new personnel.
16 V13, “Mastodon: When we deal with darker subject matter…”. September 2026; Troy Sanders on the new line-up and the band's artistic continuity.
