Mastodon announce ‘Marrow Deep,’ out Aug. 28 via Loma Vista, with single ‘Snakes for Dinner’ featuring Josh Homme’s first guest spot since 2006
Grief has always been Mastodon’s raw material, from the drowned brother of Leviathan’s subtext to the dying mothers haunting Crack the Skye and Emperor of Sand. On Marrow Deep, the loss is closer than it has ever been. The Atlanta band announced their ninth album, due August 28 via Loma Vista Recordings, their first since co-founding guitarist and vocalist Brent Hinds died in a motorcycle accident last August at 51, months after an acrimonious split from the band. The 12-song record arrives with “Snakes for Dinner,” a searing new single featuring Queens of the Stone Age’s Josh Homme.
The Homme feature is a deliberate callback. His vocal turn here, surfacing in the song’s final minute and in its suitably warped video, is his first appearance on a Mastodon recording since “Colony of Birchmen” on 2006’s Blood Mountain, the album that broke the band to a wider world. Announcing the record, the band called Homme a longtime friend and admitted the album was quite the journey to make. Twenty years later, the reunion reads as a band reaching back to a touchstone from their imperial phase while facing forward into a fundamentally changed existence.
A New Lineup, an Old Hunger
Marrow Deep is the first Mastodon full-length recorded as a five-piece. Founding members Troy Sanders, Bill Kelliher, and Brann Dailor are now joined officially by guitarist Nick Johnston and keyboardist João Nogueira of the Claypool Lennon Delirium. Sanders has framed the new configuration as a reset, saying the current lineup feels like the band’s earliest days, “united, and excited to get to work.”
The record was tracked at the band’s own West End Sound facility in Atlanta and co-produced with an unusually interesting pairing: Patrik Berger, the Swedish pop architect behind records for Lana Del Rey and Charli XCX, and Kurt Ballou, the Converge guitarist who has engineered half of modern heavy music’s essential catalog. Andrew Scheps, whose mixing credits run from Adele to Black Sabbath, handled the mix. More special guests beyond Homme are promised.
Thematically, the band is working from the Three Fates of Greek mythology, the sisters who spin, measure, and cut the thread of every life. It is difficult to imagine a more pointed framework for a record written in the shadow of Hinds’ death, and the album’s closing track carries the concept’s name. The announcement follows last week’s release of The Mastodon in the Room, a candid short film in which the surviving members process both Hinds’ loss and the fractured relationship that preceded it.
The Rollout Continues This Fall
“Snakes for Dinner” is technically the second preview of the record, following June’s “Your Ghost Again,” a direct tribute to Hinds that has already landed near the top of fan polls for the year’s best heavy songs. Both appear on the tracklist alongside titles like “Barbarians Blood,” “Golden Spires,” and “A Vampire’s Demeanor,” with cover art by Paul Romano, the painter behind the band’s classic mid-2000s album artwork.
Mastodon will support the album on the Poisonous Weapons Tour, a North American run with the formidable support pairing of Deafheaven and Alcest that opens September 16 in Orlando and closes October 22 with a hometown show in Atlanta. For a band that could plausibly have ended after the last two years, Marrow Deep is shaping up as something rarer than a comeback. It is a continuation, made by people who decided the thread was not ready to be cut.
Marrow Deep tracklist: “Barbarians Blood,” “Poisonous Weapons,” “Your Ghost Again,” “Snakes for Dinner,” “Out Like a Lamb,” “In the Ruins,” “They’re Coming for You,” “Golden Spires,” “Moth and Bone,” “A Vampire’s Demeanor,” “The Vanishing,” and “The Three Fates.”
