In March of 2025, proggy sludge-metal band Mastodon bid founding member, lead guitarist, and vocalist Brent Hinds adieu, while Hinds bid his ex-bandmates to go fuck themselves. “Sometimes people grow apart and they get interested in other things,” said Bill Kelliher, the group’s rhythm guitarist. “It was time to part ways.” “I won’t miss being in a shit band with horrible humans,” came Hinds’ retort three months later. So, overall, let’s just call the breakup mutual. Then came Hinds’ fatal motorcycle crash in August the same year, and an outpouring of grief from his fans as well as his erstwhile rockers-in-arms, who took his sudden death as a seismic blow, regardless of whatever curdling rancor led to his split from Mastodon. Death is a motherfucker, as well as a powerful force for reckoning; it hurts worse than losing a limb and provokes painful, impossible-to-ignore sensations like despondency, existential dread, and most of all remorse. If you could have just one more conversation with a deceased loved one, what would you do? What would you say? Would you reconcile with them? Express your anger at them for rifts opened and left that way before they died? Maybe you would sit back and jaw with them, which, as these exercises in wishful thinking go, sounds like a rather decent use of your time. On the other hand, if you’re a musician, you’ll pour all of that feeling into a fresh batch of songs and call it an album, which is what Mastodon have done in Marrow Deep, their ninth studio production. It is impossible to engage with their work here without thoughts of Hinds as well as drummer Brann Dailor’s late mother, and the influence both had on the textures of each of the record’s 12 tracks. The band started recording them in September, a month after Hinds died—too new, too recent, too incalculably terrible an experience not to have outsized impact on their sound. And hey, would you look at that: Marrow Deep is, in so many ways, a reflection of the profoundly discombobulating effect that death has on the living, being at once cleanly produced but messy, meticulously written. Chaotic and ugly but sublime. Mastodon’s sad truth is that they’ve done this before. Death is a familiar acquaintance and frequent guest on their albums: 2009’s Crack the Skye is shaped by the suicide of Dailor’s sister in his teen years, Kelliher’s bereavement at his mother’s death is core to 2014’s Once More ‘Round the Sun, and the band’s last record, 2021’s Hushed and Grim, is their farewell to Nick John, their longtime manager, who passed away in 2018. (The list goes on longer than that, but life is short enough as is.) Experience has little meaning when dealing with death, though, especially in cases such as Hinds’; as such, Marrow Deep suggests a band that has never once written about death, but rather is facing it for the first time and racked by uncertainty and self-doubt over how to deal. There’s a great beauty to their confusion, though perhaps it’s better to qualify the record’s overarching atmosphere as one of surrender—to death, to dying, to unreconciled friction, to the awful realization that we’ll never see our dearly departed again. Each track is a confluence of these ideas, related but nonetheless competing with one another; some, of course, afford such joinings with keener insight than others. Take “In the Ruins,” for example, where the band’s polyrhythmic tendencies marry with moody descending melodies from João Nogueira and plucked harmonics from Kelliher and Nick Johnston. After about two minutes of this soulful mourning, somebody slams the gas pedal, and the track picks up into higher gear, matching the chafed lyrics in the process. “The last act of love we can give to those we hold,” Troy Sanders howls over the fourth verse, “Where there’s deepened grief there was great love.” The song documents both a moment of calamity and the confrontation of its aftermath; if it’s literally about a collapsing house, we can pretty easily surmise that under the hood, “In the Ruins” is wrestling with Hinds’ exit from Mastodon, too. “No distorted ego when we’re given grace,” Sanders adds on the pre-chorus. What a novel idea: forgiveness. Sins are all the rage in the 2020s; we tend to prioritize talking about them at the expense of virtues. But forgiveness is an awesome virtue, and may be Marrow Deep’s engine from start to finish. On “Poisonous Weapons,” Dailor urges the song’s subject—Hinds, of course—to “turn, run as fast as you can,” to escape the grasp of addiction and alcoholism, as Sanders’ bass thumps and hums in agreement. Meanwhile, in the chorus, Sanders hails “the weakest link,” which sounds like a dirtbag thing to say about a dead man until one accounts for how hard it is to care about someone who leans into their self-destructive tendencies. You want to yell at them, pound your fists at them, shake them until they snap out of their cycle of sabotage. For what it’s worth, Mastodon did, and frankly still does, care about Hinds. “When you left you took the moon and stars,” Dailor croons over the fuzzed-up blitz of Johnston and Kelliher’s guitars, and his own rattling percussion, on the chorus of “Snakes for Dinner.” Maybe that’s a tough one to hear after “Poisonous Weapons.” But Mastodon’s relationship with Hinds was, to say the least, complicated, and the work the band does on the album in meeting those complications is a marker of immense maturity. It is possible to love someone as much as you loathe them, and to be grateful they’re gone as much as you miss them. Marrow Deep captures those intertwined conflicts with thunderous clarity. [Loma Vista Recordings] Bostonian culture journalist Andy Crump covers the movies, beer, music, and being a dad for way too many outlets, perhaps even yours. He has contributed to Paste since 2013. You can find his collected work at “his personal blog.” He’s composed of roughly 65% craft beer.