Brent Hinds 1974 – 2025

Brent Hinds was a complex character. For 25 years, the guitarist was Mastodon's restless soul, the band’s loose cannon, an unpredictable, untameable, and frequently self-destructive, force of nature.

Born William Brent Hinds in Helena, Alabama, on January 16, 1974, and grew up in nearby Birmingham, or "Boring-ham", as he once described his hometown. Talking to Guardian writer Stevie Chick in 2009, Hinds would describe his younger self as "a total hellion, straight outta hell, with red eyes and everythin'."

"I was very dysfunctional at school," he added, "just a jackass. I'd take LSD and come to class still tripping. I was too creative, never doing my homework, just filling my notepad up with drawings of skulls."

While his adolescence may seem like an appropriate gateway into a career testing, stretching and redefining the boundaries of metal with one of this century's most respected and revered bands, Hinds actually took a circuitous path - via homeschooling in bluesgrass and country, and a year studying classical guitar at the Alabama School of Fine Arts - to his chosen vocation.

"My dad’s cool as hell," Hints told Rolling Stone in 2009, "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, and then I focused on being an awesome guitar player. My mom would come in and say, ‘Are you OK? You haven’t been out of your room in two days.’ I’d be like, Don’t worry, I’m not masturbating, I’m playing guitar."

In the early '90s, Hinds moved to Atlanta to join [future Mastodon bassist] Troy Sanders’ band Four Hour Fogger after seeing the group play his local dive bar The Nick. At the time, by his own admission, Hinds was “a fucked-up kid”, a habitual heroin user, a borderline alcoholic and a heavy user of LSD and marijuana.

"I was very disgruntled back then," he told the Let There Be Talk podcast in 2018. "Basically, I was a [Game of Thrones-esque] Wildling before the Wildlings came along. I was just wild. I slept outside, I slept in a car... I had a job, I would just go out and just pass out wherever, like in bushes and shit."

Hinds had a succession of jobs in construction - working as a framer, a roofer, and a stone paver - while pursuing his musical endeavours. His future Mastodon bandmate Bill Kelliher saw Four Hour Fogger play a club called The Point in Atlanta’s bohemian Little Five Points district in the spring of 1998, and was impressed by the guitarist.

"I remember seeing a bunch of naked dudes with pantyhose on their heads running across the stage," he told me in 2014, "and this skinny, ginger dreadlocked guy playing a Flying V. I was like, Woah! Who the hell are these crazy dudes? The music wasn’t exactly my cup of tea – there was so much chaos that I couldn’t even really tell what was going on – but they were putting on a really cool, out-of-control show, so I was really intrigued. And the guitar player was incredible."

Hinds and Sanders hooked up with Kellieher and his former Today Is The Day bandmate Brann Dailior shortly after the two Rochester, New York musicians moved to Atlanta in January 2000. It was the group's second album, 2004's superb Leviathan, which brought Mastodon to global attention, put them on the covers of music magazines worldwide, and earned praise from some of their musical heroes, Metallica and Tool among them.

Hinds did not always assimilate smoothly into rock's premier league. In 2007, following a violent altercation at the MTV Awards at Universal City in California, the guitarist was hospitalised and lapsed into a coma for three days.

"I showed signs of waking up, so the doctors took the catheter out of my penis, and when they did that, I woke up and projectile vomited over everybody," he told The Guardian in 2009. "And I wish they hadn't done that, because it felt really good to be asleep for that long. Afterwards, I was laid up on the couch for months, with really extreme, euphoric vertigo. The whole entire time I was carving wood, getting tattoos and playing my guitar. I was going to band practice, with vertigo. I don't think I ever really let on to myself, about how serious the injury was. I'm stubborn. My dad says, 'You can't kill stupid'."

Hinds was the driving force behind Mastodon's masterful 2009 album Crack The Skye, and remained one of the band's principal songwriters until his shock departure from the group in 2025. The split, announced in March, was initially sold as an amicable parting, though recent online posts from Hinds suggested that he was dismissed from the unit, which clearly hurt the guitarist more than he cared to admit.

Tensions between the guitarist and his bandmates were not new. In 2019, this writer conducted an interview with a pissed-off and raging Hinds in which he was so scathing and bitter about his bandmates that, for the first and only time in my professional career, I made the decision to delete the entire conversation out of sensitivity for their group dynamic, and suggested to Kelliher and Dailor that they might wish to have a sympathetic word with their friend.

Two years later, Kerrang! journalist Sam Law also caught Hinds on a day when the guitarist, who could be sweet, charming, generous and gracious, seemed at the end of his tether.

"Atlanta is a total shithole," he moaned. "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…"

These words would prove horribly prophetic.

On Wednesday, August 20, Hinds was riding his Harley Davidson in Atlanta when a BMV SUV failed to stop at an intersection, causing a fatal collision. The musician’s death was due to multiple blunt force injuries. He was 51 years old.

And so the world of music has lost another true original. Farewell Hellion, Wildling, Genius.

Brent Hinds: January 16, 1974 - August 20, 2025