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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.
