Announced barely a month before its release, the Atlantan group’s ninth album arrives with a statement of intent from bassist/singer : “It’s reminiscent of the very beginning of our band, where all members are hungry, we’re united, and excited to get to work.” You can hear it from the first bar.
Where 2021’s ‘Hushed and Grim’ was a reflective double album that took its time when it needed to, ‘Marrow Deep’ is the leanest, most bone-crushing record Mastodon have made since 2006’s ‘Blood Mountain’, even as their proggier instincts still find room to breathe. The LP hits with such directness, such gut-punch heaviness, that for the first time in years I felt like the teenager who first got his brain melted by Mastodon, speeding down country lanes with the windows down and no clue why it felt so good.
This band has always turned grief into art. ‘Crack The Skye’ grew out of drummer Brann Dailor’s grief over the loss of his teenage sister to suicide; ‘Emperor of Sand’ emerged from a run of cancer diagnoses that tore through the band’s own families. ‘Marrow Deep’ continues that lineage, and it’s the heaviest instalment yet. Founding guitarist Brent Hinds parted ways with the band in March 2025 amid reportedly tense circumstances, and was killed in a motorcycle accident five months later. Dailor lost his own mother that same February. Tellingly, the album borrows its title from a phrase the band once used to describe their bond with their late manager Nick John – “marrow deep” – now doing double duty for both losses.
It’s strange, and often genuinely sad, not to hear Hinds’ distinctive guitar work and country-dipped howl anywhere here. But this doesn’t sound like a band picking at a wound. It sounds like one running forward with no pretence, simply thankful to still be here doing what they love – a feeling the tribute single ‘Your Ghost Again’ makes explicit, with Dailor admitting he still catches Brent “out of the corner of his eye” in the studio.
Maybe sweetly, maybe sadly, the new material is the raw, pure stuff Hinds always argued the band had lost sight of.
Old friends turn up to help shoulder the weight. Queens of the Stone Age’s Josh Homme brings his best stoned croon to the tail end of the thunderous ‘Snakes For Dinner’. Elsewhere, lays down a gnarly bass solo that became the intro to ‘The Vanishing’ – a Sabbath-drenched highlight where Dailor’s own vocal is pushed through a Leslie speaker effect, the rotating cabinet Sabbath famously ran Ozzy’s voice through on , chasing that same woozy, spectral vibe as a quiet homage to a hero gone. Clutch’s Neil Fallon turns up too, on closer ‘The Three Fates’, doing exactly what he does best: a strange, sermon-like, demented-preacher turn that suits the record’s mythological framing.
As for the new recruits, the deceptively catchy ‘In The Ruins’ is where Mastodon MK2 sounds purest – ghostly keys and atmospheric guitar leads weaving through the chaos, the clearest showcase yet for where Nick Johnston and João Nogueira actually earn their keep. Canadian guitarist Johnston, rather than fretwanking all over the record, has pushed the band harder into their thrash roots; Brazilian keyboardist Nogueira isn’t dropping cheesy synth breakdowns everywhere either – he pops up only when the song calls for it. Anyone bracing for an overcooked prog mess can relax. This is, again, the mightiest Mastodon have sounded in close to twenty years.
Production-wise, ‘Marrow Deep’ was co-produced by Mastodon themselves alongside an unusual pairing in Patrik Berger and Kurt Ballou. Berger is a Swedish pop craftsman best known for Robyn’s ‘Dancing On My Own’ and Charli XCX’s ‘Boom Clap’, with further credits for Lana Del Rey and Carly Rae Jepsen – about as far from Mastodon’s usual postcode as it gets. Ballou, by contrast, is pure hardcore pedigree: Converge’s guitarist and the man behind GodCity Studio, where he’s shaped records for the likes of High On Fire and Nails. You can hear Ballou’s fingerprints all over the record’s directness and rawness. This isn’t a lo-fi affair by any means, but the guitars and drums sit firmly and proudly at the front of the mix throughout. It’s a record that sounds best blasted out of speakers rather than through headphones, and I mean that as a compliment.
Is the songwriting as immediately memorable as or ? Perhaps not quite. But the band sound to be in tremendous form regardless, hungry and unburdened in a way that suits them.
Mastodon have never dropped a dud yet. They haven’t started here.
8/10