They don’t make guitar players like the late Brent Hinds anymore. But maybe they never did. The former Mastodon guitarist, who died in a motorcycle clash in August 2025, aged 51, was the Atlanta, Georgia prog-metallers’ wild card.
He was the player who brought countrified bluegrass virtuosity to metal guitar, and a little danger to Mastodon. He was their wild card and a wild man. That brought with it some tension. He was never one for an early night.
Hinds’ exit from the band in March 2025 was messy. There was acrimony. Hinds had a few choice words to say about his former bandmates online. Drummer Brann Dailor turning up in public with a black eye only added to the speculation.
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But in a recent interview with The Guardian, Dailor, and Mastodon bassist/vocalist Troy Sanders, busted a few myths about Hinds’ exit, and reflected on their relationship with him.
For a start, there was no punch-up.
“Brent texted me when that was all stirred up, and he was like, ‘Dude, I can’t believe people think I punched you in the face!’” says Dailor.
That was one rumour put to bed.
Also, all that trash talk was just Hinds letting off some steam. Sanders says he “was trying to be funny”. Dailor admits that just the way he was. When he got the call that Hinds had died, he was “devastated” – and whatever was said or done in the heat of the moment was the last thing on his mind.
“Brent said a lot of things that he probably didn’t mean,” he says. “He liked to talk some shit and stir the pot and get people’s blood boiling, I guess. I feel like he felt he could control a situation if he threw a wrench.”
After 25 years together, Hinds and the rest of the band were on different planes. Hinds still out there partying hard when the rest of them had called time on it long ago. Guitarist Bill Kelliher famously had a health emergency in late 2008 when was hospitalised in London with alcohol-related pancreatitis. The band completed their tour as a trio.
“If any of us did half the stuff that Brent pulled off, we’d all have been dead years ago,” says Dailor.
As Hinds told MusicRadar in 2009, when the band’s magnum opus, Crack The Skye, was released, “If it ain’t about havin’ good times, I’m not interested.”
Hinds had just recovered from injury before starting work on the record. After a typically wild night out in Las Vegas he was assaulted, knocked unconscious and the risk of permanent brain damage was real.
My mind’s the most cosmic place I could ever visit
Brent Hinds
Loud electric guitars were the last thing he wanted to hear after that, and so Hinds retreated to the comfort of his acoustic guitar, smoking weed, listening to King Crimson and letting his mind run free.
“My mind’s the most cosmic place I could ever visit,” said Hinds. “All I have to do is zone out and play the guitar, and before you know it, I’ve visited places unheard of. I put all of that into Mastodon’s music.”
Dailor says that checks out. There was no disputing his talent. Hinds wore his heart on his sleeve, was quick-tempered, intense and funny, and all of that was evident right there in his playing style. “He was the real deal, you know? His emotions were right there all the time and he could easily access them through his instrument,” he says.
Mastodon’s latest album, Marrow Deep, marks the debut of Nick Johnstone, who replaces Hinds on lead guitar. It was trailed by a lead single paying tribute to Hinds, Your Ghost Again. And its title, Marrow Deep, speaks to Dailor’s grief at the loss of Hinds and the death of his mother. “Those relationships are in the marrow, it’s as deep as you can get,” he told Kerrang!
Grief is the kind of thing that stays with you. It’s something you carry. But as Dailor notes in his Guardian interview it also serves as a reminder that you’ve got some living to do, too.
“Seeing Brent in his casket was so difficult to wrap our heads around, and it makes you want to feel fucking alive,” he says. “We’re still here, so we better get to it.”
