Mastodon guitarist Bill Kelliher has explained how the band chose their name after a chance moment with late bandmate Brent Hinds, in comments shared via Spin Magazine.
Kelliher said he had spent months working on a list of possible band names but was unhappy with all of them. He and Hinds were sitting together in his apartment one day, looking for a name when the moment of inspiration struck.
“Hey, this is Bill Kelliher from the band Mastodon, and this is how we came up with the name Mastodon,” Kelliher said. “Choosing a band name isn’t really f*cking hard.”
“I remember I had a really long list,” he continued. “I was taking, like, some lyrics from, like, Bad Brains. I can’t remember what they were, though. They were all terrible. I was like, I’ve been working on this list for, like, months, and this is the best I could come up with, and none of them—I don’t like any of these. They’re all pretty terrible.”
“Me and Brent (Hinds) was sitting next to me on the couch in my apartment, and I have this—I always called it a… it’s a mythosaur, I think, skull,” Kelliher said. “I always thought it was a bantha skull. I’m a Star Wars kind of geek, and so I have all these Star Wars tattoos. But this is my first tattoo.”
“At the time, I think I only had this. And we were sitting there banging our heads against the wall trying to think of a band name, and Brent looked over at me, and he saw this. He goes, What is that? Is that— that’s like a mammoth? And I go, Mastodon? Like mammoth and mastodon. I probably never even used that word in my life. It came to me. I was like, Mastodon? And when I said it, we were all just like, [bleep], let’s make sure no one’s already used that name. But we thought we were f*cking genius.”
The name came about during a casual moment between the two musicians as they worked to find the right name for their group.
Mastodon was formed on January 13, 2000, after Kelliher and drummer Brann Dailor moved to Atlanta from Victor, New York. They connected with Hinds and Troy Sanders, who were then in a band called Four Hour Fogger, after that group opened for High on Fire at a basement show in Atlanta in late 1999. The four musicians discovered a shared love of sludge metal bands like Melvins and Neurosis, heavy metal legends Iron Maiden, and 1970s hard rock band Thin Lizzy, and shortly afterward formed Mastodon.
The band’s sound developed quickly, with their 2002 debut album Remission earning significant critical acclaim. Their second full-length release, Leviathan, was a concept album based on Herman Melville’s novel Moby-Dick. Three magazines awarded the record “Album of the Year” in 2004: Revolver and Kerrang!. In the 2010s, Mastodon achieved major American commercial success with their 2011, 2014 and 2017 albums The Hunter, Once More ‘Round the Sun and Emperor of Sand, all of which debuted in the top ten on the Billboard 200 chart.
For 24 years, the band maintained a stable lineup of Sanders on bass and vocals, Hinds on lead guitar and vocals, Kelliher on rhythm guitar and backing vocals, and Dailor on drums and vocals. On March 7, 2025, Mastodon announced that Hinds had departed from the band by mutual decision, just two days before their scheduled appearance at Tool Live in The Sand. Hinds disputed this account before his death, claiming he had been “kicked out” of the band for what he described as “embarrassing them.”
Hinds was killed on August 20, 2025, when a BMW SUV struck his motorcycle in Atlanta, Georgia. In August 2026, Mastodon released Marrow Deep, their first album with the band’s new lineup.
