A volatile visionary to the very end, Brent Hinds might’ve been born amongst the twangy bluegrass and dusty country of central Alabama, but he grew into one of the most pivotal figures in modern heavy music. Not just an iconic voice and guitarist, he was a truly larger-than-life personality, and his untimely passing has created a void that may never be filled. We look back on a life lived to the unruly max…
Cynics say there are no real rock stars anymore. Renegades with magic in their fingers, mischief on their minds and deep melancholy in their souls, like those who built the genre we inhabit are an endangered species in the increasingly gentrified world of modern metal. There will be one fewer after the events of this week, for sure. Because Brent Hinds was a real rock star. His passing in a motorcycle accident close to midnight on August 20, 2025 robbed us of the biggest of big beasts.
Lyrical genius, guitar god and (sometimes) great vocalist, Brent was also complicated, contrarian and often wilfully uncooperative. Mastodon were the band with which he made his name and cruised to unimaginable victories. Having parted ways with Brann Dailor, Troy Sanders and Bill Kelliher in March of this year, and subsequently slipped into acrimony, it is possible that fans may feel an awkwardness celebrating that music or grieving its loss. But that fire, that unpredictable volatility, was the fuel for unbound creativity flowing inside.
“A lot of people think they’ve got him figured out but I don’t think they do,” Brann said of his old bandmate in a 2011 Kerrang! interview for fifth LP The Hunter, named after Brent’s brother Brad who died of a heart attack on a hunting trip in 2010. “People think he’s a fucking mental case but there’s a beautiful person in there. There’s a lot to him, he’s a complex character and we love him.”
“We’re family, like brothers,” Brent himself reflected on Mastodon’s taut interrelationship the last time he spoke with K! for 2021’s eighth album Hushed And Grim. “We can still make each other laugh. We can still piss each other off. But where brothers can stop talking after a while, we have a very important mission together, playing music for other people, and for ourselves...”
Born in Helena, Alabama on January 16, 1974, performance was his passion from an early age. Rather than being immersed in rock, however, Brent found his way via the sounds of backwoods bluegrass and country, which would inform his distinctive fast hybrid picking style of guitar.
“My dad is cool as hell,” he explained his twangy genesis as a player to Rolling Stone in a revealing 2009 interview, “but in an asshole move, he made me learn the banjo before he would buy me a guitar. So I was learning all this hillbilly music with my uncle – then then I focused on being an awesome guitar player. My mom would come and say, ‘Are you okay? You haven’t been out of your room in two days.’ I’d be like, ‘Don’t worry, mom. I’m not masturbating, I’m playing guitar!’”
Leaving behind Alabama for the southern metropolis of Atlanta, Georgia, by the mid-1990s he was already a local legend. Joining up with Troy (a considered yin to Brent’s chaotic yang) in earlier project Four Hour Fogger, his reputation as a mercurial menace preceded him: the best guitarist in town, if he turned up to practice in a fit state to play. When Bill and Brann entered their orbit after leaving behind noise rockers Today Is The Day and the chill of upstate New York – crushing beers, doing mushrooms and watching the bands play at an early High On Fire show at now-defunct basement The Parasite House – there was instant rapport and a starburst of inspiration.
Brent set a madcap tone from the outset. The evening of their first jam together began at still-favoured local Mexican restaurant Elmyr, where Bill was employed at the time. The ‘Tequila Girls’ – scantily clad promo waitresses – were in town, and Brent duly overindulged, getting into a fight with the chef. “They went out into the street and everything,” Brann would recall for a K! 20th anniversary celebration in 2020. Bill remembered fearing he’d be fired, “like, ‘Dude! What the fuck?!’” and that the subsequent session wasn’t much better: “He just rode on that low E-string…”
When Brent turned up again the next day – January 14, 2000 – banging on their apartment door to join the jam, they reluctantly let him in. “He started noodling all these crazy riffs,” Bill recalled. “It was like, ‘This guy’s great. Where was he last night?!’” More than just raw technical talent, they saw Brent’s personality, individuality and appetite to forge something from disparate influence like Melvins and Thin Lizzy. Most of all, they saw a fellow lost musician (at that point toiling away in construction), willing to practice five nights a week and endure thousands of miles in the back of a van for thankless club shows in dive bars, basements, VFW halls and once even in a China Buffet.
“There were a lot of red flags, for sure, but I ignored them,” Brann would much later reckon of Mastodon’s helter skelter coming-together. “To me, finding someone unique, special and amazing, who shares your musical soul, is much more important than [peace and quiet]. You could be the worst person on the planet and I’d deal with it for this music that is my whole life.”
Milestones would come thick and fast. 2002’s Remission is still arguably the most accomplished extreme metal debut of the 21st century. Both 2004’s landmark Leviathan and 2011's The Hunter would go on to be named Kerrang!’s Album Of The Year. More emphatically, 2006’s Blood Mountain and 2009’s Crack The Skye underlined Brent’s pivotal role in the four-part formula: his proggier experimentation and runaway flourishes a resplendent counterpoint to Bill’s weightier classic metal riffs; his nasal whine a primal answer to Brann’s accomplished croon and Troy’s deeper howl.
Unmistakable with his fiery red hair, cold blue eyes and Polynesian face tattoo, Brent was a natural focal point. His refusal to speak anything other than his own truth and willingness to jump headlong down the rabbit hole meant that his legend only grew. System Of A Down bassist Shavo Odadjian recently debunked the old rumour that he punched Brent out following the 2007 MTV VMAs in Las Vegas, claiming that it was rapper Reverend William Burk forced to swing on the guitarist in self-defence. This writer can confirm that one particularly boozy night in Belfast saw a dishevelled Brent flagging down fans on the street for directions to where he could find cigarettes – and how he could get back to his hotel. And K! photographer Andrew Lipovsky will happily tell of one photoshoot which saw Brent repay a compliment by giving him the stylish shirt off his back.
Mastodon was far from Brent’s be all and end all. Supergroups Giraffe Tongue Orchestra (featuring The Dillinger Escape Plan guitarist Ben Weinman as well as Alice In Chains vocalist William DuVall) and Legend Of The Seagullmen (with Tool drummer Danny Carey) showcased an untold breadth of creativity. He featured with acts as unexpected as CKY and The Black Keys. Gojira frontman Joe Duplantier explained to K! in 2021 that conversations with his good friend heavily informed the sound of the French titans’ Fortitude. More than anything, it was his old pals in masked metallers Fiend Without A Face, genre-defying prog collective West End Motel (“a conglomerate of losers and poets and hobo-sexuals”) and post-Mastodon project Dirty B & The Boys which stoked his passion. In a section of our 2021 interview which is legitimately uncomfortable to listen to today, he explained that his part in those much smaller bands was why the dedicated biker was still based in traffic-clogged Atlanta even after the rest of Mastodon had moved away.
“Atlanta is a total shithole,” he seethed at the time, with what turned out to be haunting foresight. “I don’t want to live here. But I can’t really move as my rehearsal space is right down the street from my house. In the last few years, Hollywood movie companies have moved in, bringing this giant influx of people, driving traffic through every ventricle of the city. It’s hard for locals who’ve lived here for 30 years. You can still ride [a motorcycle] in the city, but it’s like a death sentence…”
Indeed, death wasn’t a topic around which Brent ever shied away. “How hard was it?” he pondered the writing of The Hunter back in 2011. “It was as hard as it would have been for you if your older brother had just died of a heart attack at 39…” Discounting last year’s brief Lamb Of God collaboration Floods Of Triton, Brent’s last two releases with Mastodon were both wreathed in darkness. 2017 EP Cold Dark Place might have ended up as a solo record had things worked out differently, and although its magnificent title-track is about a brutal break-up, the language of love and loss seems to spiral right off the mortal coil. Likewise, Hushed And Grim unpicks the experience of losing long-time manager Nick John in the context of life untidily going on.
“It seems like someone has to die for us to make an album,” he reflected, poignantly, in 2021. “When loved ones close to us die, we feel obligated to pay this homage to them musically for some reason. We’re here all these years later with all these records under our belts dedicated to fallen friends. When you make music about someone who’s passed, it makes them still alive…”
Legacy mattered not to Brent, of course. His passion was derived from the beating heart translation of untamed spirit to captivating sound. So as much as songs will doubtless be written with an eye toward his unbridled influence, unbending character and unfathomable loss, it’s the awesome, otherworldly music he leaves us with that will guarantee his memory lives forever.
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