Mastodon members Bill Kelliher and Brann Dailor have opened up about their final efforts to help guitarist Brent Hinds before his death. The band revealed that they held a meeting where they read Hinds a list of issues that were making him deeply unhappy, but he walked out halfway through — the last time bassist Troy Sanders ever saw him.
Kelliher spoke candidly about the band’s attempts to reach Hinds and the toll his struggles took on those around him.
“I tried to talk to Brent, like, ‘Dude, just be appreciative that you’re doing what you love,'” Kelliher said. “He was such a tortured soul, tortured artist, he couldn’t see the light. He wanted to fight everything all the time. To me, that’s addictive behaviour, because when you’re f*cked-up all the time, you feel like shit, and then you always have people like, ‘You’re the best! F*ck everybody else, take these drugs, drink this booze, get up there and f*cking shred.'”
Kelliher went on to explain why the band’s honesty ultimately drove a wedge between them and Hinds.
“It gets in your head,” he continued. “We were not yes men – that’s why he stopped hanging around with us as a band, because we were telling him, ‘No, you can’t do that!’ like a kid. But he was a rebel in every way.”
Reflecting on the painful final chapter of their relationship, Kelliher expressed deep regret over how things ended.
“I feel terrible how it ended,” he said. “I wish he could be alive, and that someday we could have mended our ways. If he fucked up, he would always admit it a couple days later, like, ‘I was being a dick. I drank too much, I’m really sorry. I love you guys,’ and he came back around as a human. But those demons would get him the next day. He would just get back into the booze and be a dick.”
Drummer Brann Dailor also reflected on the circumstances surrounding Hinds’s departure from the band, emphasizing that the decision came from a place of care.
“Things got shitty towards the end, but [him leaving] was out of love, and I really wanted him to be happy,” Dailor said. “None of us thought it was going to end in his demise. We thought at some point we were going to bury the hatchet, have a hug and be like, ‘That was some dumb shit…'”
The interview is part of a wider cover story on Mastodon’s new album Marrow Deep. The surviving members reflect on Hinds’s life, his firing, and the grief that followed his passing.
The weight of those words proved all the more devastating in the months that followed. What the band had hoped would be a turning point became, instead, a permanent goodbye — one that ended not in reconciliation, but in tragedy.
Hinds departed Mastodon in March 2025 after walking out of the intervention meeting before Sanders had finished reading his letter of grievances. It was the last time the band saw him alive. Just five months later, on August 20, 2025, Hinds was killed in a motorcycle accident in Atlanta at the age of 51. He was riding a Harley-Davidson at nearly twice the speed limit when an SUV turned left and failed to yield at an intersection. He was pronounced dead at the scene.
The loss hit the band with a grief they had not anticipated. They had believed a reconciliation was still possible. The finality of his death left them without the closure they had hoped for — the kind of grief that comes not just from death, but from an unfinished story.
In the immediate aftermath of Hinds’s departure, the band brought in YouTuber and Mastodon superfan Ben Eller as a last-minute stand-in for the Tool in the Sand festival. They later permanently recruited Canadian prog-fusion guitarist Nick Johnston as his replacement. Johnston has since become a full member of the band and will appear on Mastodon’s forthcoming ninth studio album, which the band completed recording in May 2026.
Hinds contributed nothing to the new record. The album will mark the first Mastodon release without the co-founding guitarist who had been central to the band’s sound since their formation. For Kelliher, Dailor, Sanders, and the rest of the Mastodon camp, it represents both a new chapter and a permanent reminder of what was lost.
