It has been a long arduous road to Mastodon‘s upcoming ninth studio album. The GRAMMY Award-winning progressive sludge metal group parted ways on bad terms with their guitarist/vocalist Brent Hinds in 2025. While the band vowed to continue to work on this album without him, and stated at the time it would not feature any of his writing contributions. Then, this past August, tragedy struck when Hinds was killed in a motorcycle accident in Atlanta, GA.
As it turns out, that wasn’t the only loss the band’s camp endured over the past few years, as drummer/vocalist Brann Dailor also lost his mother as well. Speaking recently with Blabbermouth.net, Dailor confirmed that work on the record has concluded. He stated of that:
“We’re very excited about it. It was a hard record to make. It was a very emotional time for us. I lost my mom, we went through all this turmoil with Brent, and then he passed away. It’s been tough. It’s all in the music, it’s all in the songs, and I’m excited to release it and get it out there into the world because we’ve been sitting on it for a while. A lot of this stuff, at least the skeletons of what this album is, we’ve been sitting on for two years now. A lot was going on.”
Dailor also reaffirmed that the record won’t feature contributions from Hinds:
“No. It’s all new stuff. Toward the end, unfortunately, it was hard to get him to come down to the [practice] space. He was interested in doing other stuff, which was fine. It was a confusing time. [Laughs] I was the one going, ‘Come on, man. Come down. Let’s riff.’ He was a free spirit. He wanted to ride his motorcycle around and go do this and that.
He was wherever the wind took him. Unfortunately, it was not down to the practice space to work on riffs. It was a little bit frustrating. I was okay with it. I was like, ‘Hey man, everyone can do whatever they want to do in their life. If you’re unhappy and not wanting to be here doing whatever, figure out what does make you happy and do that.'”
In a comment made on made on social media today, May 10th, Dailor confirmed that the band will be releasing the album later this year, with more details to come.
