Mastodon played House of Blues – 9/23
Prog-sludge metal vets Mastodon made a triumphant return to Boston last month, accompanied by Deafheaven and Alcest.
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Though they’ve been around and frequently on the road for two and half decades, Mastodon have remained something of a white whale for me – slightly ironic I realize, since they have a concept album about one. The fates simply never aligned and the Atlanta crew proved elusive, despite my digging the records and covering Southern sludge contemporaries like Baroness and Kylesa plenty of times over the years. It was an oversight I was glad to finally correct last month when the band brought their fall tour to town in support of Marrow Deep, their first new record in five years.
The gap marks a transitional period and a sort of rebirth for the band, who parted ways with founding guitarist Brent Hinds in early 2025, shortly before his passing in a motorcycle accident later that year. It was a chain of events that clearly weighed heavy on the band, who’d existed as a core foursome up to that point since their 2000 formation, but remaining founders Brann Dailor, Bill Kelliher and Troy Sanders regrouped to make some of the heaviest and most immediate music of their career in its wake. Marrow Deep is indeed full of heaters – like the thunderous set-opener “Barbarians Blood” – and the band packed those amidst plenty of back catalog favorites for nearly two hours of unbridled heavy metal fervor at HoB.
Flanked by some surprisingly immersive technicolor visuals, the new-look five-piece iteration of Mastodon – which now includes guitarist Nick Johnston and keyboardist João Nogueira – barreled through new songs and old with an infectious sense of joy. While I do wish I’d caught the band with Hinds at some point, there was certainly nothing disappointing in how they’ve reshaped without him. Of course, it also didn’t hurt that friend of the band (and leader of the aforementioned Baroness) John Baizley emerged for the show’s second half for some additional punch on guitar and vocals, adding a bit of supergroup flavor to the proceedings.
Also keeping the night memorable were a pair of killer openers in French black-gaze pioneers Alcest and modern torchbearers Deafheaven. Alcest’s majestic soundscapes were a perfect appetizer for a blazing Deafheaven set that actually didn’t do much gazing at all, focusing largely on 2025’s ferocious Lonely People With Power. Sadly, they hadn’t started dropping “Hunter” from their just-released, insanely heavy At Work in the Fields of the Bomb EP into the set just yet, as they would later in the tour, but we can’t have it all.
Scroll for a supersized gallery from three photogenic sets below.
