Review Summary: Grief turned to motion
Loss has never remained outside Mastodon’s music for long. It has repeatedly marked the beginning of a creative period rather than supplying its subject. Skye Dailor’s death stood behind the ominous soundscapes of
Crack the Skye, the spectre of cancer shaped
Emperor of Sand, and Nick John’s passing birthed
Hushed and Grim. I have not heard that last album, so I cannot independently judge the reports of Brent Hinds's reduced role on it. Still, the claim matters here because his guitar work had been fundamental to Mastodon’s identity.
Marrow Deep arrives after an even sharper rupture. Brann Dailor lost his mother, Hinds left the band amid public tension, and then died only months later. What began as a response to one bereavement inevitably became entangled with another.
Yet
Marrow Deep does not spend its runtime staring solemnly at the past. Its grief is restless, physical and frequently confrontational, expressed less through memorialising than through the determination with which the band moves forward. The record is unusually aggressive by latter-day Mastodon standards, full of compact rhythmic turns, abrasive momentum and riffs that seem intent on forcing the songs into motion. That urgency gives the album a unique vibe. It does not sound like three musicians attempting to laugh at death, nor like people collapsing beneath it, but like a group discovering that work itself can become a way through.
This renewed force also reflects Mastodon’s altered shape. Troy Sanders, Bill Kelliher and Brann Dailor are now joined by guitarist Nick Johnston and keyboardist João Nogueira. The newly formed quintet performs seamlessly, and it feels like there’s an innate symphony of intuition honed over countless unseen hours. Johnston does not imitate Hinds, which is the sensible choice. The familiar progressive, sludge and psychedelic vocabulary remain, but the country twang, wiry phrasing and flashes of mischief that Hinds could introduce at the least predictable moment are far less prominent. In their place is a straighter metallic attack: disciplined, muscular and often thrilling, although occasionally so controlled that one misses the unstable chemistry of the old quartet.
Dailor’s work behind the kit is the engine of that attack. His playing has always stretched beyond accompaniment, but here the drums seem to argue with the riffs, interrupting and redirecting them without weakening their weight. Some of his most intricate passages are also among the album’s most purposeful; his technical beats develop into momentum rather than decoration. Kelliher and Johnston answer with guitars that alternate between blunt pressure and clean, spacious lines, while Sanders grounds Mastodon's cosmic sprawl, keeping their soaring ascent fiercely human and rooted. The result is recognisably modern Mastodon, though with some of the accumulated polish stripped away in favour of a more immediate impact.
That immediacy, I feel, is not perfectly served by the production. At its best, the mix feels broad enough to contain the band’s scale, keeping busy percussion, layered guitars and vocal multiple harmonies intelligible without reducing their force. Elsewhere, the heavier passages could use more density underneath them; the attack is clear, but the body behind it may feel somewhat lean. It is a curious tension for music this imposing as individual parts may sound enormous, yet the combined blow sometimes lands with less mass than the writing promises. Nogueira’s keyboards create a useful haze and melodic colour, although they too can sit at the edge of the arrangement when a more structural role might have deepened the songs.
Marrow Deep is most persuasive when those moving parts produce disparity rather than simply complexity. The jazz-inflected bridge in
The Three Fates opens an unexpected pocket of air, suggesting a Miles Davis looseness passing through an Opeth-like arrangement without becoming a self-conscious genre exercise.
The Vanishing, meanwhile, folds Geezer Butler’s bass and Joe Duplantier’s voice into a distinctly Sabbath-shaped psychedelic drift. Its Ozzy-like vocal contour and distant echo of Sabbath’s
Planet Caravan make the homage apparent, but the song belongs to the album’s own language of absence and continuation. Elsewhere, appearances from Josh Homme, Randy Blythe, Nate Newton and Neil Fallon broaden the communal feeling without turning the record into a parade of cameos. Their presence reads less as spectacle than as musicians gathering around a band in transition.
For all its renewed appetite, the album does not completely recover the controlled chaos that once made Mastodon feel capable of changing direction mid-riff while still arriving exactly where intended. There are passages where intricacy shades into excess, and others where the contrast between brute force and atmospheric release follows a familiar route. Hinds’s absence is clearest here, not because every unconventional Mastodon idea belonged to him, but because his peculiar instincts could disturb the band’s polish at useful moments. The current lineup is too accomplished to sound tentative, yet accomplishment alone cannot replace that friction.
Even so,
Marrow Deep is far more than a respectable continuation. It is the work of a veteran band trying to find its footing after an awful period, and there is nothing half-hearted about it. The musicianship remains exceptional, the heavier approach suits them, and the emotion behind the performances is easy to feel. I doubt this album will redraw the boundaries of their music in the way their greatest records did. It does, however, show that the band can absorb a profound change without losing itself. They sound wounded, angry and determined to carry on. Hopefully, this new version of the band can now move beyond some of that grief and give us plenty more reasons to keep revisiting the Mastodon-verse.
Recommended tracks:
Barbarian’s Blood
Your Ghost Again
Snakes for dinner
Out like a Lamp
They're coming for you
Golden Spires
A Vampire's Demeanor
The Vanishing
The Three Fates
