Dream Theater guitarist John Petrucci started trolls typing when he recruited Mike Portnoy for second solo album Terminal Velocity. It generated speculation that, after Portnoy’s traumatic departure from DT a decade earlier, the door might be opening for his return. And while that was to happen three years later, in 2020 Petrucci told Prog that wasn’t part of his plan – and he had a selfish motivation in wanting Mike Mangini to remain in the band.

One of the world’s most celebrated virtuoso guitarists, John Petrucci has been a driving force behind Dream Theater since their inception in the 1980s. His musical journey began with studious practising of the guitar, before playing Iron Maiden and Rush covers at Berklee College Of Music alongside Mike Portnoy and John Myung, who between them would form the nucleus of Dream Theater.

Petrucci’s gentle voice and mild manner belies some of the fury that zaps from his fingers, but his solo material – as well as the music made during his day job – continues to ooze plenty of nuance, with melody and songwriting remaining key, as demonstrated on his solo record Terminal Velocity.

And so to the moment when Petrucci and Portnoy reunited. The drummer spent six days recording for the album, basing his work on full programmed drums put down by Petrucci and his engineer James ‘Jimmy T’ Meslin.

Bassist Dave LaRue, who’d worked with Petrucci on Suspended Animation and the G3 tours, and is also Portnoy’s bandmate in Flying Colors, recorded bass.

“Dave came in and did an amazing job, but drummer-wise, I wasn’t sure,” Petrucci says. “When Mike was in the band and I did my first solo album, I purposely didn’t want to use him because I wanted to keep my solo album separate from Dream Theater.

“But now he’s not in Dream Theater any more, so it was a perfect opportunity. I’d told him I was working on it and he – maybe unbeknownst to him – planted the seed.

“He was like, ‘Hey, if you ever need a drummer, I’m here.’ It kinda just like stuck in my mind: ‘Hey, Mike would be great on it.’ It was really cool having him come in. He did an awesome job.”

But what was it like when they faced each other in the studio for the first time in a decade?“At one point I picked up my guitar – we were going to work on something – and he’s like, ‘Okay, this is the first thing we’re going to play in 10 years together. Just guess what it is,’” Petrucci says.

“He counted it off and started playing… and I came in with the wrong song! I didn’t read his mind. I think he was playing the first song that [their pre-Dream Theater band] Majesty ever wrote. I thought he was going to play Metropolis. That was totally wrong!”

The guitarist is clear on one thing, though: the rekindling of the Petrucci-Portnoy working relationship isn’t going to have any effect on Dream Theater.

“People will speculate that Mike playing on my album all of a sudden means that things are gonna change in Dream Theater, and it’s not that at all,” he confirms.

“Mike Mangini is the drummer in Dream Theater. That’s not changing, and I want to make sure that people don’t extrapolate something that’s just not the case.”

He added: “For me, selfishly, it’s great because I get to reunite musically with Mike Portnoy and have him play drums on my album, and then still be in Dream Theater with Mike Mangini. So I get to play with two of the greatest drummers in the world.”

Death shadows few bands like it seems to shadow Mastodon. Several of the Atlanta band’s past albums have been directly and indirectly informed by loss and grief, from 2009’s psychedelic prog-metal masterpiece Crack The Skye (inspired by the death of drummer/vocalist Brann Dailor’s sister) to 2021’s Hushed And Grim (dedicated to their late manager Nick John).

Marrow Deep hits even harder. It comes 12 months after the death of their former guitarist Brent Hinds, who left the band acrimoniously at the start of 2025, as well as the death of Dailor’s mother. How much of Mastodon’s ninth album has been specifically shaped by those events isn’t clear – lyrically they’ve always dealt in the cryptic and the elliptic, although that title is something of a tell.

Musically, the album’s dense knottiness can’t hide the seam of anguish at its core, but it’s not a dour listen. Longtime members Dailor, bassist/vocalist Troy Sanders and guitarist Bill Kelliher – augmented here by touring guitarist Nick Johnston and keyboard player João Nogueira – have retained their heaviness and complexity.

Barbarians Blood pushes on through a wind tunnel of its own creation, slipping from time change to time change as the grizzly Sanders and smoother-voiced Dailor alternate vocals (poignantly, Hinds’s voice, so often the third leg on the stool, is notably absent). The roaring A Vampire’s Demeanour is fuelled by what sounds like cathartic fury, unsurprisingly.

But any air of moroseness is dispelled by Marrow Deep’s shape-shifting approach. Poisonous Weapons shifts from low rumble to upward-spiralling euphoria, and Nogueira brings jazzy detail to In The Ruins – territory Mastodon have never really ventured into before.

Elsewhere, Geezer Butler adds a fantastically fitting bass intro to The Vanishing that sounds like it could have been lifted from any of the first four Black Sabbath albums, before the track veers off into liquid-psychedelic Planet Caravan territory (Dailor has talked about it being his vision of travelling into the cosmos to be reunited with his mother and his late sister). Clutch’s Neil Fallon makes his second appearance on a Mastodon album, here dialling up the babbling backwoods preacher man act on the playfully ominous The Three Fates.

In its own way, Marrow Deep is a defiant album, one that takes all the bad experiences the band have endured in recent times and turns it into something positive. Not laughing in the face of death, but not crumbling under it either.