Brann Dailor Says Mastodon’s First Album Without Brent Hinds Is Finished

Mastodon has finished its ninth studio album, and the milestone lands with extra force because it is the first full-length the band has made without Brent Hinds. Brann Dailor confirmed the record on May 10, 2026 and described the process as a difficult one, which gives this release a different kind of gravity than a routine album cycle.

For drummers, that matters because Dailor is not just the player keeping Mastodon’s machine running. He is one of modern rock’s most distinctive drummer-vocalists, the kind of kit-and-voice figure whose fills, accents and melodic instincts often shape the emotional contour of a Mastodon song as much as the guitars do. If the making of the album was as hard as Dailor suggested, listeners will want to hear how that pressure shows up in the parts: tighter transitions, heavier textures, less predictable song turns, or the way his vocals and drumming lock together when the band pushes into more complicated terrain.

The new record arrives after a major break in Mastodon’s history. On March 7, 2025, the band said Hinds had mutually parted ways after 25 years, and it said touring plans for 2025 would remain intact. Hinds had been part of Mastodon’s original four-man core for a quarter-century and played on all eight of the band’s previous studio albums, beginning with Remission in 2002 and running through Hushed and Grim in 2021. That makes this the first Mastodon LP without one of its founding voices, a change that can reshape feel, chemistry and the internal pulse of a band as much as any personnel move on paper.

The stakes around the album have only grown since then. Hinds died on August 20, 2025 in a motorcycle accident in Atlanta at age 51, a loss that added another layer of weight to a period already marked by transition. For a band built on long-form compositions, shifting dynamics and precision between heavy swing and prog-metal intricacy, getting to a finished record after that kind of upheaval is its own statement of survival.

Mastodon’s resume explains why the next phase will be watched so closely. The band has nine Billboard 200-charting albums, six Grammy nominations, and a Best Metal Performance win for “Sultan’s Curse” at the 60th GRAMMY Awards in 2018. Hushed and Grim, released on October 29, 2021, stretched to 86:17 across 17 tracks, a double album that already showed how expansive Mastodon could get. Now that the ninth album is done, the real drummer’s preview begins: hearing how Dailor translates loss, pressure and reinvention into the pocket, the textures and the vocals that define Mastodon’s next era.