Photo: Clay Patrick McBride
Mastodon released "Your Ghost Again" this morning, their first new music since founding guitarist Brent Hinds died last August. Hours later the band announced The Poisonous Weapons Tour, a 27-date fall headlining run with Deafheaven and Alcest.
In a video posted to their Instagram, the band’s three founding members walked through what the song is and why they chose it to go first.
Brann Dailor traced it to being back in a familiar place without the person who used to fill it. He kept seeing Hinds “out of the corner of my eye,” he said, in the spot where he always stood with a guitar, his mind catching at a presence that was no longer there. Bill Kelliher put the choice more plainly. The band wanted to lead with “a song that sounds like Mastodon,” he said, one that holds everything they do, and he stopped short of going deeper because too much of it is personal. Patrik Berger, who has worked with Taylor Swift and Robyn, produced the track with Converge’s Kurt Ballou, and it leads a ninth album the band has already finished.
Troy Sanders wrote his part of the song “all about Brent, and for Brent,” he said, shaping the bridge around a couple of lines of gratitude for everything Hinds gave him and the years they spent onstage together. That gratitude doubles as the band’s first real public reckoning with the loss. Dailor admitted they had never properly addressed Hinds’ death, that they simply couldn’t, and that he is “still unpacking it,” hoping the song lands for fans carrying their own grief.
Hinds had been gone from the lineup for months before he died. He and the band parted ways in March 2025 after 25 years together, a split they called mutual and left mostly unexplained. YouTuber and session player Ben Eller covered a festival set in the Dominican Republic days later, but the touring chair soon went to Nick Johnston, a Canadian fusion guitarist whose playing runs cleaner and more exploratory than Hinds’ country-warped leads. Johnston has been onstage with Kelliher, Sanders and Dailor across Europe this spring, and Kelliher has confirmed that he wrote and recorded parts for the new record. Hinds died in a motorcycle accident in August, roughly five months after the split.
The tour carries all of that into the fall. It runs 27 dates, starting September 16 in Orlando and wrapping October 24 in Dallas, with the Brooklyn stop landing September 24. Deafheaven and Alcest ride along for the full run, a support bill pulled from the center of blackgaze, the corner of heavy music where shoegaze’s wash of guitar meets black metal’s blast and shriek.
Deafheaven earned that slot on the strength of Lonely People with Power, the 2025 album we loved, which pulled them back toward the ferocity of their early work after the clean-sung detour of Infinite Granite. George Clarke spends most of it screaming again, and the band built some of its sharpest songs around him. Alcest, the French project that helped invent the style in the first place, brings more melody and atmosphere than most metal tours bother to carry.
General go on sale Friday, June 5 at 10 a.m. local time.
MASTODON TOUR DATES:
9/16 – Orlando, FL – Hard Rock Live
9/18 – Asheville, NC – Asheville Yards
9/19 – Pittsburgh, PA – Stage AE
9/20 – Louisville, KY – Louder Than Life Festival
9/22 – Philadelphia, PA – Franklin Music Hall
9/23 – Boston, MA – House of Blues
9/24 – Brooklyn, NY – Brooklyn Paramount
9/25 – Washington, DC – The Anthem
9/27 – Montreal, QC – MTELUS
9/28 – Toronto, ON – Rebel
9/29 – Buffalo, NY – Buffalo RiverWorks
10/1 – Detroit, MI – Fillmore Detroit
10/2 – Chicago, IL – Riviera Theatre
10/3 – Minneapolis, MN – Palace Theatre
10/6 – Salt Lake City, UT – The Complex
10/7 – Boise, ID – Revolution Concert House & Event Center
10/9 – Oakland, CA – Fox Theater
10/10 – Los Angeles, CA – Hollywood Palladium
10/11 – San Diego, CA – The Sound
10/14 – Denver, CO – Fillmore Auditorium
10/16 – Des Moines, IA – Val Air Ballroom
10/17 – St. Louis, MO – The Pageant
10/18 – Memphis, TN – Satellite Music Hall
10/20 – Cleveland, OH – The Agora
10/21 – Greensboro, NC – Piedmont Hall
10/22 – Atlanta, GA – The Eastern
10/24 – Dallas, TX – Sick New World Dallas Festival
