Presented by GRAMMY.com, Songbook is an editorial series and hub for music discovery that dives into a legendary artist's discography and art in whole — from songs to albums to music films and videos and beyond.
Even though it sounds like the product of some urban legend, buried deep in the digital detritus of an obscure Reddit thread, the members of Mastodon really did meet at a High on Fire show in 2000.
Drummer Brann Dailor and rhythm guitarist Bill Kelliher were already well acquainted and a fixture of the New York underground scene, having played together in mathcore outfit Lethargy and noisegrind act Today Is The Day. After relocating to Atlanta and stopping by a High on Fire show in a friend's basement, they quickly forged an easy friendship with bassist Troy Sanders and lead guitarist Brett Hinds over their shared love of sludge metal, classic new wave British heavy metal (NWOBHM), and dive-bar hard rock staples.
Contrary to most acts in the genres of metal and rock, Mastodon has never been a revolving door of membership. With the exception of original lead vocalist Eric Saner (who left the group in its infancy prior to any formal releases), the core quartet has remained unchanged for over two decades. It's easy to see how this continuity has been fundamental to their success, impressive body of work and growth as musicians.
With each member of the group bringing their unique talents to bear across their diverse discography — Dailor's impeccable polyrhythms and smooth melodic croon; Hinds' banjo-inspired hybrid picking and wailing growl; Sanders' rumbling low-end tone and gruff yell; Kelliher's steady rhythms and technical versatility — Mastodon's collective unity has created something greater than the sum of its gifted parts.
In the latest edition of Songbook, GRAMMY.com explores the dense themes and progressive impulses that have motivated Mastodon for over two decades — from their molten sludge metal origins to their embrace of heady psychedelia and hard rock songwriting.
Listen to GRAMMY.com’s Songbook: An Essential Guide To Mastodon playlist on Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music and Pandora.
(Editor's note: This list focuses on the core Mastodon discography and excludes EPs and live albums.)
Summoning Hail And Flame
To fully appreciate Mastodon's turn-of-the-millennium beginnings, it's necessary to jump forward in time ever so slightly. Released in early 2006 as one of their final projects with long-time label Relapse Records (and before their big-league step up to Reprise Records and Warner Music), Call of the Mastodon provides a scattershot sampling of the band's early years.
Featuring tracks from the Slickleg and Lifesblood EPs — both originally released in 2001 and remastered by original producer Matt Washburn — this compilation LP showcases a proto-Mastodon still in formation. Repackaged out of sequence, the compositions sound less like the towering and imposing beast of their Pleistocene namesake and more like a wild elephant calf finding its feet. However, this sonic adolescence still manages to provide subtle hints toward the band's future potential.
From the thrash-like precision and murky downstrokes of "We Built This Come Death" to the frantic rhythmic pummeling of "Welcoming War," it's clear that Hinds and Kelliher always had the chops as axemen to rival sludge icons like Eyehategod's Jimmy Bower and High On Fire's Matt Pike. Both "Shadows That Move" and "Hail to Fire" bristle with livewire energy that feels almost hardcore-inspired, while "Battle at Sea" and the droning "Deep Sea Creature" point towards the quartet's inclination for distortion, juxtaposition, and thematic lyrical gestures — albeit across a more abrasive vocal range that future albums would wisely temper.
While the compilation may lack the overall narrative cohesion and vision of their later records, Call of the Mastodon should ultimately be viewed as the band's first "true" album — a sentiment Kelliher expressed to Loudwire in 2017.
If Call of the Mastodon represented the Atlanta quartet finding their feet, then their official debut album is the moment that truly stamped their arrival on the American heavy metal scene.
The sonic leap from those early EPs to Remission (2002) is noticeably stark, present in almost every facet of the record: the heavily saturated, down-tuned crunch of quaking album opener "Crusher Destroyer"; the coarse bellows and multi-pronged vocal attack from Hinds and Sanders; the lengthy experimental gallop of "Trainwreck" and "Trilobite"; Dailor's effortlessly intricate drum fills and accents; and engineer Matt Bayles' (Botch, ISIS, These Arms Are Snakes) thick, weighty production.
Although Remission isn't strictly a concept album, Mastodon weaves together thematic elements to complement their towering riffage and serpentine grooves. With fire as a loose motif, tracks like "Burning Man" and lead single "March of the Fire Ants" draw on hellfire imagery to add emotional color to expressions of hopelessness and torment. "Where Strides the Behemoth" and "Ol'e Nessie" channel mythical creatures as metaphors for revelatory visions and desperate soul-searching, while "Trampled Under Hoof" throws back to the "life's blood" of the group's origins.
Yet, perhaps the most grounding inspiration comes from Dailor, who described the record as an outlet for grief following his sister's suicide when he was a teen: "I was never able to put that stuff anywhere. All that pain I was carrying inside. The pain of losing her had always been there… When I started playing in Mastodon and moved to Atlanta, there was a big personal healing. Mastodon had a lot to do with that. That's one of the main reasons that the album is titled Remission. Remission means forgiveness and healing."
Paul Romano's striking album cover — a distressed "Workhorse" caught mid-combustion and near-death, as vibrant purple flames erupt from its torso — brings it all together: fading strength and all-consuming power; bitter cycles of life and death; anger and love; existential heaviness and divine light. Following Remission, Romano illustrated all of Mastodon's artwork throughout their first decade.
Through The Salt, Earth And Sky
Mastodon needed to take things to the next level on their sophomore LP and push the scope of their Southern sludge metal into the realm of the gargantuan and monolithic. Curiously, inspiration for this conceptual leap came in the form of two unlikely sources: the recurrence of elemental leitmotif, and American novelist Herman Melville's Moby-Dick; or, The Whale (1851).
This deep engagement with Melville's "Great American Novel" allowed the group to continue the use of elemental cues as their dominant theme. Where Remission used fire to stand in for themes of redemption and rebirth, Leviathan (2004) turned to the sea as the spiritual catalyst for exploring mortality and the band's desire for greatness.
As Dailor explained in several interviews, there were a number of parallels between the fixated obsessions of Melville's now-iconic Captain Ahab and the band's longing to establish a legacy in the hallowed halls of metal. Discussions among the quartet acknowledged that this pursuit was, in part, a manifestation of their own "white whale," their collective and elusive "sea salt mastodon."
Musically, the record throws the listener overboard into a raging tempest. Opener "Blood and Thunder" sports one of the most iconic and recognizable riffs in the genre, while vigorous cuts like "Aqua Dementia" and "Naked Burn" successfully split the difference between density and playfulness — equal parts Melvins and Slayer, Neurosis and Thin Lizzy. Yet even such lofty ambitions can't sink the record's staggering 13-minute opus "Hearts Alive," a track that effortlessly fuses the lumbering mass of Sabbathian doom with lugubrious melodic undercurrents.
Despite future albums achieving ever higher levels of commercial success, Leviathan spawned four singles ("Iron Tusk," "Blood and Thunder," "I Am Ahab," and "Seabeast"), received multiple Album of the Year accolades, was inducted into the Decibel Hall of Fame in 2016, and is now considered one of the defining metal albums of the 21st century.
With their status as metal titans now solidified, Mastodon used this creative freedom to refine and expand their sonic template. As the band told Dave Grohl in a revealing interview for Revolver, much of the impetus behind Blood Mountain (2006) came from seeking out "melody as a fifth instrument."
For their third LP, the quartet leaned into intricate vocal layering, ambient textures and dizzying instrumental wandering of psychedelia harder than ever before. This progressive flirtation was immediately evident with the double lead single "Crystal Skull/Capillarian Crest." The former moves briskly through gnarled tempo changes and locked-in grooves from Sanders and Dailor, allowing each harmonized riff from Hinds and Kelliher to shine brighter; the latter frequently descends into jazzy prog passages, resting on a lofty chorus and mystic nods to "cosmogenic cycles" and "universal dreams."
Drawing heavily from Joseph Campbell's The Hero With a Thousand Faces (1949), Blood Mountain crafts a fantasy epic worthy of a hefty acid trip, with earth as the primary elemental cue. Supercharged opener "The Wolf Is Loose" is a carnal, riff-centric beast that guides the record's overarching narrative. Utilizing a deceptively catchy hook, "The Wolf" sets up a werewolf protagonist, the quest for a crystal skull to replace a reptilian brain, and the ascension of the album's titular peak.
Bolstered by guest features from Scott Kelly (Neurosis), Josh Homme (Queens of the Stone Age), Isaiah Owens and Cedric Bixler-Zavala (the Mars Volta), Blood Mountain racked up accolades from outlets like Kerrang and Metal Hammer, while also scoring the group their first GRAMMY nomination for the album's third single "Colony of Birchmen" — itself a direct homage to Dailor's love for English rockers Genesis, further shoring up Mastodon's progressive credentials.
Piecing together Mastodon's exploration of elemental leitmotif across their 2000s output, a distinct narrative telos begins to emerge. Beginning with the fiery molten core of Remission, we move outwards from the planet's center to the sprawling watery depths of Leviathan, before stepping foot on earthly terra firma in Blood Mountain. Taking this conceptual thrust to its logical end, Mastodon's fourth LP concludes their early album tetralogy with air or "aether" as its elemental lodestar.
Crack The Skye (2009) is one of the band's most meditative and diffuse efforts, exploring themes of disembodied emancipation. "[Crack The Skye] is a departure from everything we've previously recorded in the sense that we kinda strapped on our aeroshells and departed from Earth for a while," Sanders told Stereogum. "Basically we're exploring the ethereal world. We're dissecting the dark matter that dominates the universe, in a nutshell."
Switching out Matt Bayles for producer Brendan O'Brien (AC/DC, Pearl Jam, Stone Temple Pilots), alongside the works of King Crimson and Frank Zappa as instrumental touchstones, Mastodon's continued search for that long-desired "fifth element" had finally reached its lofty zenith. With the welcome addition of Dailor's melodic croon to the group's already potent lead vocal register, tracks like "Oblivion" and "Divinations" approach anthemic transcendence, pushing their weighty sonic profile into the stratosphere off the back of arresting hooks and sublime vocal harmonies.
Elsewhere on the record, ethereal elements combine to push their storytelling into narrative overdrive, drawing on references to paraplegia, Tzarist historical actors ("The Czar"), occult rituals, astral projection ("Quintessence"), Mephistophelean bargains ("The Last Baron") and sci-fi wormholes. And yet, for all its thematic density, Crack The Skye still retains a sense of playful wonder and emotional majesty, whether it be through the cathartic release of tension on "Ghost of Karelia" or a moving tribute to Dailor's sister Skye on the album's expansive title track.
The Dance Of Death
After a string of critically-acclaimed records and building rich narrative-driven worlds to accentuate them, Mastodon began to feel the need for a creative reset. Following their world tour throughout 2009-2010, which included a European run with Metallica, the band began work on an entirely new creative endeavor: scoring the film adaptation of the DC comic Jonah Hex (2010).
While the band were initially given full creative control on the project, the score and the film itself were met with several production issues and changes in composer, forcing the band to scrap the entire thing and start again. (Hinds even lamented to Vulture that the shelved material was "some of the best s*** I've ever written in my life.") With their creative juices now thoroughly drained and the score's final form — the Jonah Hex: Revenge Gets Ugly EP (2010) — is a pale imitation of what might have been. As a result, it's hardly surprising that Mastodon chose to strip things back at the conceptual level for their upcoming fifth studio album.
The Hunter (2011) was a lean and multi-faceted record that pulled liberally from their back catalog while also remixing stylistic influences with a sharp ear for accessibility. GRAMMY-nominated single "Curl of the Burl" plays out like a funked-up QOTSA, with "Octopus Has No Friends" and "Dry Bone Valley" acting as spiritual cousins to the mind-melting psych of their previous LP. Tracks like "Blasteroid" and "Stargasm" embody what Dailor describes as "super-heavy Led Zeppelin," walking a fine line between meaty drop-C chugging and shimmering lead work. The cackling laughter and Moog synth-scapes that open the epic "Creature Lives" feel like sincere Pink Floyd worship.
The Hunter also marked the band's first time working with Californian producer Mike Elizondo (Maroon 5, Avenged Sevenfold, 50 Cent), along with the use of a sculpture titled Sad Demon Oath by woodcarver AJ Fosik for the album's artwork. And much like Remission almost a decade earlier, The Hunter has a fluid thematic focus, shifting from a tribute to Hind's brother on the title track (who died from a heart attack during a hunting trip) to digressions about birds, sex in space, and childhood video games.
Continuing where The Hunter left off, Mastodon's sixth LP once again left the concept album behind in favor of more liberatory forms of expression. With band members namechecking influences as diverse as Alice in Chains, Deftones, Rush and Foo Fighters — all of whom had worked with producer Nick Raskulinecz previously — the band's transition from sludge metal lifers to outright prog- and hard rock advocates feels like a tacit no-brainer.
Speaking with Rolling Stone, Dailor describes the sonic range explored on Once More ‘Round the Sun (2014) with noticeable excitement:
It's gonna be massive and insane, lots of epic greatness. There will be lots of huge riffs and new directions. It's real weird, real math-y, real straightforward. It's up, down and all around. It's a culmination of everything for the band. The snowball keeps rolling and collecting snow.
And yet, much like Oakland-based artist Skinner's evocative album cover — a vivid "psychedelic nightmare painting" of a tessellated cosmic dragon-demon figure — Once More ‘Round the Sun cycles through eerily familiar moods and themes. Opener "Tread Lightly" hits like the Mastodon of old; "High Road" contrasts crunchy, riff-heavy sections with a strong hook and Hind's flashy fret-work; "Feast Your Eyes" and "Chimes at Midnight" offer up the high-octane verses, open choruses and spacey bridges that have become the quartet's signature.
Things also get weird in spots: Dailor's soaring chorus on "The Motherload" is one of the group's most direct attempts at a radio-rock hit — even if the single's twerk-laden video makes for a fun little head-scratcher. Later, Atlanta punks The Coathangers pop up on "Aunt Lisa" for a strange gang vocal section ("Hey-ho/ Let's f****** rock and roll"). But when Mastodon do strive for alt-metal cohesion, as on standouts "Asleep In The Deep" and "Ember City," the results are stunning and richly textured.
At the level of theme, Once More ‘Round the Sun does feel like a bit of an oddity in the band's back catalog. While Kelliher has insisted that the album's guiding motif is death itself — aligning it spiritually with Remission and The Hunter — its compositions feel far too jubilant for this theme to resonate in any meaningful way. Still, this narrative ambiguity is far from a hindrance, as it's still one of Mastodon's best performing records and responsible for the quartet's third GRAMMY nomination.
Exploring The Desert And Darkness
At this point in Mastodon's journey, it might seem difficult to track their intended trajectory. Should the group further dilute their sound and abandon their abrasive edges for further crossover appeal? Or perhaps a pivot back to their sludgy roots is called for? The answer, as it turns out, is to essentially do both: Double down on the dance with death that defined their 2010s output, while also synthesizing all eras of the band into a formidable, cohesive whole.
For example, take the punchy one-two that opens Emperor of Sand (2017). "Sultan's Curse" — which earned the group their first GRAMMY win for Best Metal Performance — pairs Hinds' intricate leads with Kelliher's charged rhythms before bursting open into swelling melodies from Dailor and Sanders. Then, immediately chasing that shot of adrenaline with a mid-tempo alt-rocker, "Show Yourself" takes that Mastodon formula and promptly twists it into grungy, truck-stop radio territory.
Inspired by the brutal reality of cancer — including the passing of Kelliher's mother, and diagnoses for Sanders' wife and Dailor's mother — Mastodon returned to the concept album for their seventh LP, shading increasingly elaborate story elements with real-life tragedies. Unifying themes of survival and temporality, Emperor of Sand focuses on a protagonist facing a death sentence from a cruel desert sovereign, ultimately forced to wander alone in a barren wasteland and confront the grim shadow of their own mortality. As Sanders states:
To that end, the album ties into our entire discography. It's 17 years in the making, but it's also a direct reaction to the last two years. We tend to draw inspiration from very real things in our lives.
Like Leviathan, Blood Mountain and Crack The Skye before it (including the return of producer Brendan O'Brien), this progressive impulse goes on to yield exhilarating results, with zig-zagging riff sections ("Precious Stones," "Word to the Wise"), muscular bursts of aggression and emotional catharsis ("Roots Remain," "Andromeda"), droning atmospherics, colorful synthesizers, and memorable hooks ("Steambreather," "Clandestiny," "Jaguar God").
Ensuring that dedicated fans would not be left out in the cold during the creative stalemate of a global pandemic, 2020 saw the release of yet another Mastodon compilation LP. Cheekily titled Medium Rarities, the release celebrates the band's 20 year milestone by bringing together 70 minutes of previously unreleased live versions, bonus tracks, instrumentals, standalone originals and a slew of eyebrow raising covers — further adding to the quartet's versatility and prolific output.
The unreleased "Fallen Torches" (featuring frequent collaborator Scott Kelly) is a worthy throwback to Leviathan's might, with a devastating build-up and planet-cracking riff as a finisher. Mastodon's cover of Metallica's legendary instrumental "Orion" (from Master of Puppets) is faithfully rendered with just enough sludge metal kick to make it their own.
Originals like "Cut You Up with a Linoleum Knife" from the Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film for Theaters (2007) soundtrack and "White Walker" from Game of Thrones are equally amusing: the former acts as a snotty blast of tongue-in-cheek punk-metal; the latter a plaintive and elegiac ballad fit for feuding kingdoms.
While Medium Rarities may lack a "cohesive whole," it nonetheless underscores the band's chameleonic ability to shift between various moods and styles. Notes Steve Beebee in Kerrang, "Rather than adhering to anything so obvious as chronology it becomes a seemingly random, yet highly effective, stampede — but that's Mastodon to the core."
After everything Mastodon have delivered across their prodigious career, it's fitting that their first effort for a new decade is also their most ambitious. Composed of 17 tracks and clocking in at nearly 90 minutes in length, the spellbinding double LP Hushed and Grim (2021) requires a certain level of commitment even for the most dedicated fan.
With Paul Romano returning to provide the record's moody cover — a spindly old tree, knotted with whorls and adorned with spirit animals, awash in muted hues — the band enlisted the help of Canadian producer David Bottrill (Tool, Muse, Placebo) to render each lamenting composition in evocative detail, making Hushed & Grim by far the darkest and most collaborative entry in the quartet's catalog.
As Dailor explains, themes of death and cancer once again dominated their conceptual framework:
[The tree] is an afterlife mythology that when you pass away, your spirit goes into the heart of a tree and then experiences all the pillars of your life in successions of the seasons that the tree experiences. That is the way you're able to say goodbye to the natural world and move on to the next dimension. You can see a green man in the center of the tree — the heart of the tree — and that is our good friend and manager Nick John, who passed away, unfortunately, a couple of years ago. [Nick] has a lot to do with the inspiration of the album.
Opener "Pain With An Anchor" echoes this sentiment with a sorrowful ode to the sting of defeat. Grief then turns to righteous anger on "The Crux," "Savage Lands" and "More Than I Could Chew," while the closing trio of disc one — "Skeleton of Splendor," "Teardrinker" and "Pushing The Tides" (also the band's sixth and latest GRAMMY nomination for Best Metal Performance) — move swiftly from moments of melodic mourning to raging bursts of energy.
Elsewhere on disc two, this recognition of emotional heft results in some of the most striking Mastodon tracks ever recorded. Two Sanders-led cuts, "Dagger" and "Had It All," flirt with the melodramatic, and border on goth-rock balladry with the addition of sarangi and French horns. Epic closer "Gigantium" reaches out for divine inspiration, wrapping Hind's solo work with elegiac strings and violin.
One element common to all Mastodon records is symbology. Forming part of the band's iconic typography and logo, each album features a distinct glyph that denotes the record's overarching theme: sun, fire, water, earth, aether, wood, cycles and time.
As Albert Chessa of The Mastodon Podcast argues, the symbology of Hushed & Grim and its inclusion of the "Zenithal Crescent" glyph helps to conceptualize all of Mastodon's work as a functional meta-narrative:
In symbolic language, the arc-form signifies both beginning (sunrise) and end (sunset), as well as evoking a pair of embracing arms — one that gives, another that takes away… Four figures on each side (past and future), viewed from bird's eye view, gather around a portal (or tomb) — an Octogram, evoking eternal rest and remembrance (∞)… Zenithal means ‘highest point' — thus, this glyph honors someone who always brought out the very best of those he loved.
Of course, at the material level, Mastodon are still just four friends, sharing in their creativity and making heavy music together. Yet, what Hushed & Grim proves is that the Atlanta quartet will likely never be content with creative complacency, continuing to have surprises in store for those willing to venture beyond the music.
