When a band lose one of their founding members, as Mastodon did with last year’s tragic departure and death of guitarist Brent Hinds, the music that comes afterwards is unavoidably haunted. Absence has its own acoustics. The amp is still there, the guitar is not, and the air seems to remember. More interesting, though, is how great bands don’t merely mourn absence, but learn to weaponize it.
Marrow Deep, the group’s ninth album and first in five years, arrives right out of that fracture as a collective trying to metabolize public grief, private devastation, and the strange indignity of having to keep making things after the person who helped make them is gone. No one in Mastodon, one suspects, particularly wanted another album about loss. Given the option, they’d probably rather write about Cysquatches. Monsters, myths, and fantasy offer grief a mask. Except memory is a stubborn ghost, one that doesn’t care much for artistic preference.