Brent Hinds was a force of nature and a mass of contradictions. He was a classically trained guitarist with the mercurial swagger of an old-school rock’n’roll wildman. He spent 25 years singing and playing guitar in Mastodon, one of the defining metal bands of the 21st century, yet professed to hate metal. He could be volatile, sweet, fucked-up, philosophical and a million other things, sometimes all at once.
“Brent was one of the last truly bigger-than-life personas that I know in the game,” says William DuVall, Alice in Chains frontman and Brent’s bandmate in 2010s supergroup Giraffe Tongue Orchestra. “He was a genuine, unforgettable, lunatic presence. There are very few people that you’ll ever meet that keep it that real and that live that close to the edge all the time.”
“He was one of the most non-stop creative forces that I have ever come in contact with,” says Brent’s longtime friend, Lamb Of God guitarist Mark Morton. “With Brent, it oozed out of every pore. He was an artist in the most pure sense.”
Brent Hinds lived life proudly and unapologetically at full tilt, his path rarely straight but always utterly compelling. The music he made with Mastodon, from 2001’s Slick Leg EP to 2021’s Hushed And Grim, via such landmark albums as Leviathan, Crack The Skye and The Hunter, bore the mark of a musician who existed where genius and chaos collided.
Tragically, on August 20, 2025, that life was cut short when Brent was killed in a motorcycle accident in his adopted hometown of Atlanta. He was 51.
“Some people have more of a crazy streak than others, and I’m one of them,” he told Metal Hammer in 2014. “I don’t look at it like it’s a bad thing.”
Born on January 16, 1974, William Brent Hinds’ formative years were a mix of discipline and defiance. His dad insisted the young Brent learn to play the banjo before Hinds Sr would buy his son a guitar. But even at that age, Brent had a serious outlaw streak.
“I was very dysfunctional at school,” he told The Guardian in 2009. “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.”
Despite studying classical guitar at the Alabama School Of Fine Arts, Brent lived more like a character from a Beat novel, hopping trains and getting into the hard stuff.
“I was a total hellion, heroin addict, son of a bitch from Hell in my 20s,” he said.
“Brent was always drawn to the seedier side of life, the ‘Screw the Bourgeois, let’s go sit under a bridge and drink a half gallon of vodka’ mentality,” says artist Jordan Barlow, one of Brent’s oldest friends. “That’s where so much of his ethos came from.”
Seeing future Mastodon bandmate Troy Sanders’ then-outfit Four Hour Fogger was a key moment in Brent’s musical journey.
“This wild, homeless-looking goon was at the show, who turned out to be Brent,” Troy told Metal Hammer in 2009, recalling his first encounter with the guitarist.
“He immediately expressed an interest in coming up to Atlanta, two hours away, to jam with us. A week or so later, he’d moved over and we started making music together.”
By the early 2000s, Brent and Troy had hooked up with out-of-towners Brann Dailor and Bill Kelliher. Their very first jam was inauspicious – Brent staggered in drunk and began playing a single doomy note.
“I was like, ‘What the fuck is everyone talking about?’ This guy is supposed to be the best guitar player in Atlanta,” Brann told Metal Hammer in 2011. ‘But he came by the next day and picked up an acoustic guitar and started riffing this crazy shit. I was like, ‘Awesome! Let’s go straight to the rehearsal room now and start playing!’”
What Brent brought to Mastodon was more than flash. He carried the mindset of a classical guitarist, with an ear for arpeggios, swells and intricate chord shapes.
“Once you get to a certain level of playing, you get to a certain level of writing music,” said Brent, referring to his classical training. “You don’t write at elementary level anymore. You’re writing complex stuff.”
“I think he heard things that we just don’t hear,” says Mark Morton. “The music that he heard in his mind, which he channelled into his playing, was singular and unconventional. He was very Hendrix-esque in the way he channelled his energy and sound through his playing.”
It wasn’t just musical weight that Brent brought to Mastodon, it was emotional weight too. 2011’s The Hunter bore the scars of personal grief – it was partly inspired by the death of his brother Brad, who died while hunting the year before.
And Oblivion, the opening track of 2009’s Crack The Skye, was informed by a head injury the guitarist had suffered after getting into a fight at the MTV Music Awards in 2007. The latter incident had left Brent in a three-day coma. When he awoke, he was battered but defiant, joking about how much he enjoyed the extra sleep. It was all bluster. The experience had thoroughly rocked him.
“Oblivion was written about me being in a coma,” Brent told me when I interviewed him around 2017’s Emperor Of Sand album. “I could hardly play the song live without tearing up because it’s such an emotional song.”
“The only thing that changed his personality was that drama when he got beat up and put in that coma,” recalls Jordan Barlow. “That’s what calmed him down. Before that, he was always very wild. He couldn’t sit still.”
That wildness may have abated, but it never completely vanished. He stopped using heroin at the age of 24, but he still drank, smoked pot and used other drugs. In interviews, he spoke openly of overcoming Xanax dependence, casually smoking PCP on the streets of Philadelphia, and taking psychedelics on tour.
“I have mescaline,” Brent excitedly told one journalist in 2006. “It’s this powder and it makes the walls fuckin’ start breathing and all that shit!”
In 2011 he administered a military-grade opiate to a Metal Hammer journalist during an interview, lending the conversation equal parts intimacy and absurdity. Beneath the hedonism, there was an authentic metaphysical curiosity.
“I’ve taken a lot of psychedelics in my life and I’ve been to different dimensions and different places,” Brent told me in 2017. “You see that this is not it. You see that this is not the end, my friend.”
There were other passions too, some of them contradictory. He hunted and fished, but he was a big animal lover.
“He loved animals ferociously,” says Jordan Barlow. “Any dog, any stranger’s dog walking down the street, he’d drop to the ground and out came the baby voice and he’d roll around and play with the stranger’s dog.”
More unexpectedly, he was an avid woodworker. He carved tikis and, more humorously, once created a giant wooden dick, patterned with veins and gleaming with lacquer. He was convinced that forests contained their own rhythm and structure if you listened hard enough.
“Has wood played a big part in my life? Jesus, yes… I’m obsessed with wood,” he told Metal Hammer in 2011.
And then there were motorbikes and the adrenaline rush that came with them. In 2016, nine years before his death, he was involved in a crash that shattered his leg, causing the cancellation of a Giraffe Tongue Orchestra tour. Even then, he wryly saw the upside of his situation.
“I was just thanking all of my lucky stars that playing guitar is what I do for a living, because it’s fun to sit around and play guitar when you’ve got a broken leg and you’re higher than an eagle’s pussy on Percocet.”
Two years later, another accident kept him from the Grammy stage as Mastodon collected the Best Metal Performance award for Sultan’s Curse, from Emperor Of Sand. Presaging what was to come, he would later lambast his bandmates in an interview for failing to acknowledge him during their acceptance speech.
His own relationship with metal was contradictory. Brann Dailor recalled Brent wearing an Iron Maiden shirt the first time they met, but the latter pushed back hard against the idea that he was a “heavy metal guitarist”.
“I fucking hate heavy metal and I don’t want to be in a heavy metal band,” he told Guitar Player magazine in 2015.
In hindsight, that spoke more to his refusal to be pigeonholed than his musical tastes. Mastodon’s 2017 EP Cold Dark Place, which Brent initially envisioned as a solo project before converting the ideas into a full band project, is dreamy, doomy and deeply personal – a reminder of how far his vision stretched. His side-projects burned with the same manic energy that fuelled Mastodon.
Alt rock supergroup Giraffe Tongue Orchestra tossed him together with William DuVall, Dillinger Escape plan guitarist Ben Weinman, Dethklok bassist Pete Griffin and The Mars Volta drummer Thomas Pridgen.
“GTO only played three concerts,” says William. “It will remain a lingering regret for me that we didn’t do more and now we won’t be able to do more. But the three concerts that we did play were quite special and now, even more so.”
Other projects included Legend Of The Seagullmen (alongside Tool’s Danny Carey), West End Motel and rockabilly-tinged party-starters Fiend Without A Face.
“You rarely meet someone with so many facets who does things in such an honest, vulnerable way,” Fiend Without A Face drummer Duane Trucks tells Hammer. “He really fucking meant what he was playing. It was not a put-on. He wasn’t just doing this for a cheque.”
![Mastodon - Oblivion [Official Visualizer] - YouTube](https://img.youtube.com/vi/Qpu5QMa9xCQ/maxresdefault.jpg)
Twenty-five years in a band will take its toll on anyone, and Mastodon were no exception. “These guys make me feel like I’m constantly doing something wrong because I’ll crack a beer at, like, three in the afternoon while I’m recording guitar,” Brent told me in 2017, discussing the Emperor Of Sand sessions. “I’m working really hard too, but I just happen to be smoking weed and having a beer.”
Still, it came as a shock when it was announced in March 2025 that Brent was leaving the band he co-founded a quarter of a century earlier. The split was painted as amicable. “We’re deeply proud of and beyond grateful for the music and history we’ve shared and we wish him nothing but success and happiness in his future endeavours,” wrote Mastodon in a statement.
Brent was less diplomatic. When a fan on Instagram lamented missing him at an upcoming Mastodon show, the guitarist replied: “I want [sic] miss being in a shit band with horrible humans.”
In August, commenting on another post, he launched a blistering diatribe aimed at his ex-bandmates on Instagram: “Fuck these guys… only I know who they really are… they are the biggest fans of them self’s [sic].”
In retrospect, it reads like a scorched-Earth manifesto, fuelled by a mix of anger, pride, sadness and perhaps the consequences of his choices. Whether that was truly how he felt, we’ll never know.
On the night of August 20, 2025, Brent’s Harley-Davidson collided with a BMW SUV at the intersection of Memorial Drive and Boulevard in Atlanta. He was taken to Grady Memorial Hospital, but died of his injuries. Conflicting reports and witness accounts painted a messy picture of the moments before the crash. Authorities ultimately cited Brent’s speed as a factor, but the precise circumstances remain unclear.
As the shockwaves reverberated throughout the metal community and beyond, tributes poured in from Machine Head, Guns N’ Roses, Slayer, Opeth, Trivium, Lacuna Coil and countless others, all celebrating the life of a man whose huge talent was matched by his sheer force of personality.
Mastodon themselves released a statement in the wake of his death: “We are heartbroken, shocked, and still trying to process the loss of this creative force with whom we’ve shared so many triumphs, milestones, and the creation of music that has touched the hearts of so many. Our hearts are with Brent’s family, friends, and fans.”
On Sunday, August 31, hundreds of people gathered outside of Elmyr, the dive bar in Atlanta’s Little Five Points neighbourhood, where Bill Kelliher once worked and where Brent and the band often raised hell. Under the scorching Georgia sun, the crowd marched through the streets in an impromptu parade in memory of their fallen friend. Bill and Brann were among them, as was High On Fire’s Matt Pike, a longtime friend and sometime collaborator of Brent’s, who spent the afternoon spinning colourful yarns about his friend.
“Every moment, whether it’s silly, insignificant, funny, angry, sad and tragic, he threw himself in it,” says William DuVall. “You’re hearing it now – people who only met him once in their life, it became a story. That’s huge, man. You don’t run across a lot of people like that.”
Brent’s funeral took place on Friday, August 29. It was a private affair, with his former bandmates all in attendance. Whatever friction had led to the split was irrelevant now. For 25 years, these four men had grown together, carried each other through triumph and adversity, creating a body of music that few other bands could rival.
“I was with those guys on their last tour together,” says Lamb Of God’s Mark Morton. “I’ve been around those guys for 20-plus years and I know there was a ton of love between all of them.”
As Brent told Metal Hammer in 2020: “More than anything, I just like to play my guitar really loud with these dudes. I’m super-proud of us for achieving what we have achieved. The goal has been achieved, many times over.”
How much unreleased music the guitarist was sitting on isn’t clear. Fiend Without A Face’s Duane Trucks has heard some of it.
“Brent’s got an entire album that hasn’t seen the light of day,” he says. “He sent me the whole album of tunes and it’s cool as shit.”
One thing that is for certain is that, like the psychic voyager that he was, Brent Hinds did not fear death. “We’re just here for a little spell, my friend,” he told me in 2017, his voice steady and upbeat. “No one needs to be afraid of what’s next because what’s next is grandiose and that’s not even it; then it goes on again. You’re a light of being. Your light of being will always be. That’s the truth.”
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