On an unseasonably toasty Seattle morning in April, 2004, four dishevelled men stumble out of the Extended Stay hotel that has served as their quarters for the past month. Powering through the lingering effects of the prior evening’s revelry, they pack their lives into the back of a battered white van. Despite the daunting 40-hour drive home to Atlanta, they are buzzing with excitement. After hours in the studio, they literally hold their fortunes in their hands – the rough mix to their forthcoming album, Leviathan.
“We bought a 30-pack of Rainier beer for the van,” recalls Mastodon drummer Brann Dailor, speaking with Metal Hammer via Zoom, decked out in an Ozzy t-shirt and drinking coffee from a mug featuring John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever. “It was just the four of us and the rough mix of Leviathan. I think we listened to it five times in a row! Ha ha! It was such an exciting time. The feeling among the band was, ‘Wait ’til they hear this!’”
After nearly two backbreaking years of touring the globe, followed by a month holed up in a Seattle recording studio, Mastodon – Brann, bassist Troy Sanders, and guitarists Bill Kelliher and Brent Hinds – had crafted something phenomenal. They sensed the seismic shift looming on the horizon, a tidal wave about to crash over the world of heavy metal, yet they couldn’t quite foresee how much their lives would change.
Mastodon had formed in Atlanta in 2000, and a year later they released the EP Lifesblood – a raw, unpolished gem that hinted at fearsome power. However, it was their 2002 debut, Remission, that set the stage for their ascendancy. Tracks such as March Of The Fire Ants and Crusher Destroyer were exercises in controlled chaos, showing Brent and Bill’s intricate, intertwining guitar work. Brann’s drumming was a hurricane of precision and power, while Troy Sanders’ bass lines and guttural vocals anchored the onslaught. This was modern progressive metal.
“With Remission, we started digging deep,” says Troy. “At the time, we weren’t aware that we were creating sort of a special niche; we were just all of like minds and going for it.”
If Remission was a beacon of possibility, its follow-up would push metal into bold, uncharted territories, and lift Mastodon out of the underground. While sharing a kinship with sludgy Relapse labelmates such as Neurosis, Leviathan aligned Mastodon with the emerging New Wave Of American Heavy Metal. Tours with Slipknot, Slayer and an Ozzfest spot would follow.
“Going into Leviathan, it was the same vibe and energy that we had at our very first practice,” says Troy. “We were all very dialled-in as a unit, and we were spinning off the idea that we had to give this band a chance and really go for it.”
In the year 2000, Atlanta’s subterranean music scene bubbled over with creativity, birthing sludge, metal and punk bands. Into this chaotic brew, Mastodon entered. From his home in Atlanta, relentlessly upbeat baseballhatted bassist Troy recalls, “The scene included bands like Kylesa, from Savannah, and eventually Baroness, along with local acts like Tweezer and Leechmilk. We played anywhere and everywhere. We were very much a part of that scene.”
Their tenacity soon paid off, with a deal from Relapse Records in 2001. “Things seemed like they were happening for us,” says Brann. “Everything was coming together quickly, but everyone still had their day jobs at this point.”
When they weren’t touring, Brann was a t-shirt buyer in a retail shop, Brent was in construction, Bill worked in a restaurant rolling burritos, and Troy worked for his father, packaging and shipping eBay collectibles to buyers across the globe.
“Maybe that’s why, to this day, I’m so involved in our own band’s merchandise,” Troy laughs. “I know how to make sure it gets there safely, because people are paying good money for our stuff! Ha ha ha! The goal for all four of us was to play so much and get so busy that we couldn’t have day jobs.”
Remission certainly heralded their potential, with a bludgeoning siege of neck-snapping metal and prog-rock technicality, but while touring in support of the album, they realised they had no interest in rehashing it for the follow-up. Enter: Herman Melville’s 1851 tour-de-force about a white whale.
“I had in the back of my mind that it would be cool to involve Moby-Dick somehow,” Brann recalls. The idea came to him just before a three-legged flight from Hawaii to London in 2003, prompting a last-minute purchase at an airport bookstore. “I read it on the flight over to London, and by the time I got there, I had my whole sales pitch ready for the guys,” he remembers.
Though exhausted from the journey and a few spiritbolstering beverages along the way, Brann’s pitch was a tapestry of imagery and metaphor.
“I basically said, ‘Hey, I think it would be cool if we did a concept album loosely based on Moby-Dick. You guys don’t have to read the book to participate,’” he recalls. “I just thought it would be cool aesthetically, first and foremost.”
He painted a picture of crossed harpoons and songtitles such as Blood And Thunder, based on Captain Ahab exhorting his crew to charge at the whale. “I explained that scene to the guys: split your lungs with blood and thunder… It was such a cool passage that conjured the image of these guys in rowboats, with everybody going after Moby-Dick.”
As Brann expounded on his idea, the theme of obsession in Melville’s narrative struck a chord. “The obsession with Moby-Dick was like our obsession. It wasn’t about chasing fame, it was about what kind of music we could create together,” explains Brann.
“I saw the similarities in what we did as a band,” says Bill, recalling Brann’s pitch, and speaking from the desk of his home studio, surrounded by a wall of guitars and monolithic amplifiers. “We were a bunch of dirty, stinky pirates jumping into the white van, leaving our families behind to row out to sea in search of this white whale.”
“It made sense to give it a shot,” agrees Troy. “We did realise at the time that a heavy metal band putting out a concept album about Moby-Dick could be career suicide, but we loved the idea, because we’re fans of conceptual albums by our heroes like Genesis and Iron Maiden and King Diamond. The idea was very bold. Brent, Bill and I said, ‘Let’s go for it!’”
The creation of Leviathan was a race against time, squeezed into the period between their 2003 European tour for Remission and supporting Clutch in North America in 2004. Says Brann: “All of the songs from Leviathan came together over the course of two or three months.”
Unfortunately, with the Clutch tour kicking off in February and studio time booked for March, rehearsals were a pipe dream, so they concocted a strategy utterly unthinkable today. Every night, in front of Clutch’s unsuspecting audience, they would play the new, untested material.
“The crowds didn’t really know who we were, so the reaction would have been the same. Whatever we played was new to them,” Brann chuckles.
It was a bold, almost reckless ploy, but it was pure genius. Each performance was a live-fire exercise, a chance to refine and perfect. “This was us rehearsing,” says Troy, “like a band rehearsal, but onstage in front of Clutch’s fans! Ha ha! It’s something that I don’t think could really be done now, because these days anybody could watch a shitty phone video and go, ‘That sucks!’ Ha ha ha!”
When Mastodon rolled into Seattle, their mission was clear: capture the roaring fury of Leviathan on tape. They settled into an Extended Stay hotel, two to a room, living out of their suitcases and subsisting on a diet of late-night snacks, cheap beer and adrenaline. Seattle, with its drizzling skies and grunge-soaked history, provided a moody backdrop for the recording sessions. The band worked primarily at Studio Litho, owned by Pearl Jam’s Stone Gossard.
“We were in Seattle, at the Pearl Jam guitar player’s studio, working with [producer/engineer] Matt Bayles, the guy who recorded the Isis records that we’d fallen in love with,” says Troy. “I just remember a lot of joy and love and dream-come-true moments.”
Evenings were spent at the local watering holes, where they quickly became regulars. “We drank a lot,” says Bill. “We’d go to all of the bars up on Capitol Hill. We knew everybody, because we were there for like a month. We were pretty broke, though, and the place we stayed at was so far away – maybe a 30-minute drive – and we only had one car, so we kind of had to stick around in that little area. But we had fun. I really fell in love with Seattle.”
Despite the long hours and the relentless pace, Mastodon had a sense that they were creating something monumental. To the mix, they added guest vocals from Clutch’s Neil Fallon, in a legendary turn as Captain Ahab in Blood And Thunder, and Neurosis’s Scott Kelly on Aqua Dementia. Hearing Scott’s performance for the first time was a watershed moment for Brann, who recalls: “I drove over to the grocery store to get some stuff for our little apartment. I cranked it… I sat in the parking lot and started to well up and got teary-eyed because it was so powerful and emotional.”
As they laid down the last tracks and packed up for Atlanta, they knew they had captured lightning in a bottle. Opening with the piledriving Blood And Thunder and its glorious lyric, ‘I think that someone is trying to kill me!’, Leviathan is a colossal beast of an album – an unholy fusion of prog-metal complexity and sludge-metal brutality, erupting with violence, passion and paranoia.
Bangers such as Iron Tusk and Island unleash waves of titanic fretwork, while Naked Burn and Aqua Dementia showcase Mastodon’s uncanny ability to meld ferocity with melody. Elsewhere, Seabeast drips with eerie tension, and the 13-minute epic Hearts Alive unspools as a sprawling journey, ebbing and flowing with apocalyptic grandeur.
“There are probably a lot of bands who start to go down a road they’ve never been down before and turn around,” says Brann. “We’ve always been pretty good about going all the way down that road and exploring places that might be a little scary.”
Leviathan was released on August 31, 2004. Critics were left reeling from the album’s sheer audacity, with Metal Hammer writer John Doran awarding it 9/10. “Mastodon have truly broken new ground with this release without straying anywhere near the arena of atonal noise or unlistenable complexity,” he stated.
Of Blood And Thunder, he wrote: “When this track climaxes, it rocks out so much that it almost inspired this writer to tear his living room to pieces with his bare hands. It ends up sounding like the (fantastic) Greek cult prog rock group Aphrodite’s Child being dragged kicking and screaming into the 21st century by Killswitch Engage.”
“Relapse Records were very happy with it,” smiles Troy, “and we were very proud of it. That is success to me.”
Commercially, it debuted at No.139 on the Billboard 200 – an impressive feat for a band that had been slugging it out in small clubs. It would go on to sell more than 100,000 copies within two years, and get them on tours with metal heavyweights.
“Everything really started happening after Leviathan came out,” says Brann. “We got a manager, we got on the Slayer tour, the Slipknot tour, Ozzfest, we got on that Tony Hawk videogame [2005’s American Wasteland], Blood And Thunder started playing everywhere. It was a little bit of a slow burn. It took maybe a year, and then really levelled the band up. A big level-up.”
“By the end of that next year, we all had enough to put down payments on these little houses around Atlanta, like grown people!” says Troy. “Not like pay off a house for a half million in cash – nothing like that – but to be able to afford the credit check and just to get a house. That was a true ‘Holy shit’ moment. I’m still blown away by that record and all of the hard work and dedication… I’m beyond proud of it.”
The night after their chat with Hammer, Mastodon play a ‘secret’ show at Atlanta’s Star Bar, an underground venue they played when they were starting out, and where they shot the Blood And Thunder video. Booked under the easily sussable billing of ‘Big Hairy Elephant’, tickets sold out in the blink of an eye.
Then they’re off to Grand Prairie, Texas, where they’ll kick off the Ashes Of Leviathan tour – a co-headlining run with Lamb Of God, who released their own game-changing Ashes Of The Wake on the same day as Leviathan. Reflecting on the album, Brann quotes The A-Team as he channels his inner Hannibal Smith: “I just love it when a plan comes together. With Leviathan, it really did all come together and hit that sweet spot that you’re always looking for.”
In the end, Mastodon’s quest was not unlike Captain Ahab’s – an unrelenting pursuit of a seemingly impossible goal. But where Ahab found madness and ruin, Mastodon found triumph and transcendence. Twenty years later, Moby-Dick finally received its happy ending.
“Personally, I think it’s an incredible achievement for four dudes who met up in Atlanta in 2000,” says Troy. “As one of the authors of this record, I find it magical. Like my bandmates, Leviathan never ceases to amaze me.”
Mastodon's latest album Hushed & Grim is out now via Reprise.
