Brann Dailor appears at ease and relaxed as he zooms in to our chat from his home in Atlanta. Recently returned from a European tour, the Mastodon drummer, singer and songwriter is now in the midst of the press cycle for one of the year’s most anticipated releases.
Given the circumstances under which it was recorded and conceived, it must be difficult for him to discuss it.
“A little bit,” he says breezily, running his fingers through his trademark quiff, “but it’s nothing that I’m uncomfortable with.”
Marrow Deep, the band’s ninth album, is named for the deep connection the band members shared with those Dailor calls its “two main characters”: his mother Michele Lawrence, who died in February last year, and their late former bandmate and great friend Brent Hinds.
Hinds, Mastodon’s outspoken, wild-man lead guitarist, was killed on August 20 last year in an early morning motorcycle crash, six months after he was fired from the band. Death, disease and tragedy have shaped Mastodon’s works before, but the loss of Hinds is perhaps the cruellest blow yet.
“Honestly, I really thought we were going to be able to get away with this one,” Dailor says with the hint of a grim laugh, “and be able to go back to writing about the Loch Ness monster and the skunk ape and other weird creatures like that. We were able to snag some Greek mythology with the three Fates, because I’m like, ‘We gotta do something here and get some kind of metaphor going’. I thought it was good because it sort of describes two people, my mum and Brent, who were evading the third daughter with the scissors [Atropos], and it seemed to be like hiding from her – one on purpose, and one not on purpose.”
Lawrence and Hinds had been able to miraculously avoid death on many occasions. His mother, he explains, was chronically ill from the time she was 19.
“She had rheumatoid arthritis, and from there was different unfortunate circumstances healthwise that really tried to keep her down, basically. She was in and out of hospital for years and years, and I would always get called up from Rochester in New York, from where I’m from. I live in Atlanta, and I’d get calls from the doctors in the middle of the night saying, ‘She’s not gonna make it through the night. You gotta get up here.’ Right, so I’d get a flight in the middle of the night, walk in the ICU and she’d be up – ‘What are you doin’ here?’ ‘They said you weren’t gonna make it!’ ‘How many times have they told you that?’ ‘That doesn’t mean I’m not going to come!’”
The Marrow Deep song ‘Out Like a Lamb’ is dedicated to her struggle.
“There’s a saying in Rochester where I’m from – it’s on Lake Ontario across from Canada – they would always say ‘March was in like a lion and out like a lamb’. My mum would always say that. I kind of looked at her life like that, always fighting.”
“Everything in the health system in the US is so ass-backward,” Dailor continues, with an air of bitterness. “We don’t take care of our people. It’s so sad to see someone fight tooth and nail through all of that and try to be their own advocate, but also have a brain injury and try to pull themselves out of these terrible medical situations where they don’t feel so good. It’s like this human Whack-a-Mole where every time it looked like things were getting a little bit better for her, she’d just get hit over the head again.”
In the end she died peacefully in her sleep at the age of 69.
“At least the universe found some bit of charity with her, where they let her go peacefully instead of from some violent fall, or something like that.”
Hinds was also, and famously, defiant in the face of death. But where Lawrence’s was quiet determination, Brent Hinds was complete abandon.
“He just lived his life pretty wild, you know.” There’s loss and pain on his face now, as there always is when the subject turns to Hinds. “He was a pretty wild person and he didn’t really have that switch that a lot of us do have where you go, ‘I shouldn’t do this because it’s dangerous for me’. He just didn’t have that. We’d see him doing stuff and we’d be like, ‘My God, if I did any of this stuff, I’d be dead twenty years ago!’ We’d never have made it. But he always came up smelling like a rose, and we’d be almost jealous. We’d be like ‘…Man, I can’t do that’. But he could, for a long time.”
Eventually, on a dark Atlanta roadway, Atropos severed his thread. As Mastodon albums have a habit of reminding us, it gets us all in the end.
“So the three Fates seemed fitting,” Dailor says of the album’s loose metaphor. “It’s all pre-planned for you. It’s all kind of worked out. You think that you’re cheating death, but eventually it will get you. We just wanted to remind everybody – once again!”
Marrow Deep sees the injection of two new players into the Mastodon fold, keyboard player João Nogueira and guitarist Nick Johnston. Nogueira, also known as Rasta, is a Brazilian composer, former TV personality and intellectual who contributed to 2021’s stark Hushed and Grim and features as a member of The Claypool Lennon Delirium. Johnston is a Canadian axeman with a string of highly-praised instrumental albums behind him who’s worked alongside the likes of Periphery and Polyphia toured alongside our own Plini. Both became official members of Mastodon in 2025.
“[Nick] and João were integral, I think,” says Dailor. “The way that they were able to, first of all, just be so excited to be there. So excited to be in the room at a time where, quite honestly, I was having trouble getting out of bed to go over to the studio. It was like maybe six days after Brent had died, and everything that was just heaped on top, I just felt like this really heavy grief that manifests itself in a physical way sometimes.”
The pair also brought a new perspective to the band’s songwriting. Dailor explains that their depth of musical knowledge and theory allowed the others to get over creative obstacles as they prepared the final tracks for the album.
“It was exciting because those guys were providing a lot of music theory, and sometimes you get stagnant and you bang your head up against a wall. So all the transitions and all the things we pored over when we were doing pre-production for the album, it was a lot of João and Nick saying, ‘What about this chord, or what about that chord, to bring us to here?’ It’s almost like the clouds open up and the sun shines through and you finally find the missing piece to a song. Simple chord changes, or not-so-simple chord changes. Just something interesting that we didn’t think of.”
It was nice, he admits, “to finally have a couple of people who know what the hell they’re doing! I’m not a schooled musician. I’m a self-taught player, so it’s nice to have those guys involved.”
Mastodon has always held a welcoming door open for others to collaborate with them. Marrow Deep is no different, with a list of guests that includes Ben Koller and Nate Newton from Converge, Josh Homme, Lamb of God’s Randy Blythe, Neil Fallon from Clutch and two new contributors – Joe Duplantier of Gojira and Geezer Butler. The latter two make appearances on ‘The Vanishing,’ which Dailor has clearly dedicated to his mother. The band was already “deeply immersed” in Sabbath from having opened the Back to the Beginning concert, the drummer explains, “and I already live a pretty Sabbath/Ozzy-centric lifestyle. Since I was a little kid, Ozzy and Sabbath have been present for my whole life.”
“My mum’s favourite member of Sabbath was Geezer,” he says with a smile. “She was obsessed with him and his hair. I can hear her saying ‘He writes the lyrics, man!’”
He elaborates further on Butler and Duplantier’s contributions to the track with an evident degree of relish.
“When we came up with [‘The Vanishing’] and put that kind of ‘Planet Caravan’-sounding effect on my vocal and then it sounded like this cosmic journey, psychedelic situation going on. So I decided the lyrics were going to be about maybe going out into the cosmos and making sure that my mother’s constellation hooked up with my sister’s constellation in the universe so I won’t have to worry about them, and that they’ve found each other. So having Geezer do the intro for it just couldn’t have been more perfect for the quote-unquote planets to align like that. And that big heavy moment at the end, I just couldn’t hear anything else but Joe. He was amazing. He was like, ‘What kind of words do you want me to say?’ and I was like just go ‘Arrrgh!!!!’ Just to drive the heaviness of that moment home, Joe had the perfect voice for it. That one was perfect for me.”
When asked if he considers that to be his favourite song from Marrow Deep, he’s circumspect with his answer. He ruminates and explains that he always looks at Mastodon albums as complete works rather than individual songs, so it can be a difficult question to consider.
“It’s hard for me because I see the album as one big piece from start to finish. I’m one of those people. I really don’t like singles. I don’t like to put singles out. It’s a conversation out of context. I’m like, ‘No you can’t show that, you didn’t hear the whole conversation. You’re only hearing this one little tidbit.’”
Dailor makes it his role to decide how the album will flow. In the end, he eventually admits that ‘The Vanishing’ is a favourite track, because it’s different from what might be expected from Mastodon.
“I know what I wanted the first song to be, and I knew what the last song should be within the sequence. The drum intro for ‘Barbarian’s Blood’ was the perfect introduction, when the heavy riff comes in and you go “Wooah!” I look at it like a whole journey, but ‘The Vanishing’ is definitely one of my favourites and it’s a song that I would play for somebody and they probably wouldn’t be able to guess that it was us. I kind of look for that, and it makes me stoked when there’s a song on the album and you don’t even know who it is!”
Brann Dailor is enormously proud of the work he and his bandmates have done on Marrow Deep, and the way they were able to rise above the challenges such personal tragedy wreaked upon them to bring it to the world. He hopes the catharsis they found is contagious.
“I’m super proud of Troy and Bill and Nick and João for trying to quiet the outside world and try to work through all this with the power of music. It’s the only thing we have, and it’s the only thing we know how to do, so it definitely helped. We hope that the feeling on the songs translates and helps somebody.”
Marrow Deep is out on August 28.
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