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Release date: August 28, 2026
Label: Loma Vista Recordings
Genre(s): Progressive sludge
Mastodon’s ninth album arrives the day after a year of absence that no riff could paper over. Marrow Deep is the first record without founding guitarist Brent Hinds—dismissed in early 2025, killed in a motorcycle crash that August—and it was tracked almost immediately afterward. Grief is not new material for this band.
The surviving core—Brann Dailor, Troy Sanders, Bill Kelliher—now works as a five-piece with guitarist Nick Johnston and keyboardist João Nogueira. Co-produced by Kurt Ballou and Patrik Berger, the hour-plus set still sounds like Mastodon: lurching sludge, crooked meters, stacked vocals. What changes is the weather. Nogueira’s analog swirl and organ give the songs a seventies-prog humidity that Hushed and Grim only hinted at. Johnston does not imitate Hinds; he answers him with taut, blues-bent leads that refuse to grandstand.
“Barbarians Blood” opens like a body hitting water, guest drummer Ben Koller (Converge, All Pigs Must Die, Mutoid Man, Killer Be Killed, High on Fire) punching the groove while Sanders howls that everything is already burning. “Your Ghost Again” is the record’s moral center: Dailor seeing Hinds in the studio corner, the arrangement tightening from spacey ache into a last-minute Kelliher riff that feels like a door slamming. Josh Homme (QOTSA) slinks through “Snakes for Dinner” as if finishing a conversation started on Blood Mountain. Mid-album, “Out Like a Lamb” through “Moth and Bone” turns inward—Dailor’s eulogy for his mother, Sanders on Hurricane Helene wreckage—before the late trio detonates. Geezer Butler (Black Sabbath)’s bass intro to “The Vanishing” is the album’s most elegant guest stroke; “A Vampire’s Demeanor” and the Neil Fallon (Clutch)-capped “The Three Fates” close the Greek-mythology frame with sludge and spoken doom.
The concept of “The Three Fates” is less a plot than a confession: threads get cut, and the living keep playing. Not every keyboard flourish earns its minutes, and the guest list occasionally crowds the room. Still, Marrow Deep is not a memorial plaque. It is a working band deciding that survival can be heavy, ornate, and unfinished. The wound does not close. The riffs do.
Marrow Deep is available for pre-order on vinyl, CD, cassette and download here.
Mastodon: Website
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