Mastodon Harnesses Grief in “Your Ghost Again”

Heavy Song of the Week is a feature on Heavy Consequence breaking down the top metal, punk, and hard rock tracks you need to hear every Friday. This week, we highlight the new single “Your Ghost Again” from Mastodon.

Mastodon have always worked best with grief. It’s a gift you never wish someone to have to find out they possess, but one which has brought great comfort to their fanbase for the past 20-plus years, which is no small silver lining. From the loss of siblings to parents to managers to most recently a beloved longtime band member, Mastodon have drawn from that painful well to craft some of the most powerful songs and records of their entire career, with albums like Crack the Skye and Emperor of Sand being concept records dedicated to those griefs and The Hunter and Hushed and Grim drawing deeply from that well to craft material on those albums.

It’s not a shock that a tribute to Brent Hinds, their dearly loved founding guitarist, would be the lead single of their newest album. What else is a band so well-trained in crafting beautiful art from their grief to do? What was a shock was the song’s fusion of Mastodon’s past and current identities, with dual producers Kurt Ballou and Patrick Berger pulling out both their most vicious and most tender sides. The verses combine Leviathan -era sludge thrash with Blood Mountain -era effected vocals, sounding almost like Hinds himself was singing as a ghost to the band, only for the choruses to explode into their impeccable prog rock they’ve matured into.

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But the song has more. Keyboardist João Nogueira, now a writing member of the band, gets to lead a keyboard-driven section that sounds like the kind of knotted and curious prog Opeth has leaned into over the past decade before breaking into a necksnapping final riffs. For a band this consistently brilliant, who broke open the doors for the return of prog and brought overt conceptualism back to the masses, who make such powerful music from their grief, it seemed already a foregone conclusion that their lead single would receive Heavy Song of the Week honors. What we didn’t anticipate was how moving it would be. Rest in peace, Brent Hinds. Mastodon forever.

Honorable Mentions

Cro-Mags – “Wired for Chaos”

Cro-Mags, and Harley Flanagan in particular, have the ability to tap into thrash and hardcore’s capacity to shut down the functions of the upper brain and induce that beautiful primal cathartic state. It might be easy to view that as an insult, but it’s not; we need at some point both music that elevates our minds and also music that lets us tap directly into the irrational emotions that so much of our mind works to contain. This is rage and hurt in “fuck you” spit and vinegar, something that between the brutalities of common life, the constant onslaught of evil in the news and the general struggles against the bonds of mortality fill us with like venom dripping from a snake’s tooth into an open wound. Sometimes, I don’t want to think. I want to thrash and I want to scream.

Emma Ruth Rundle – “Powerless”

Emma Ruth Rundle has the profound capacity to slice right through my emotional armor no matter how thick I think I wear it. Here, she fuses her earlier heavy shoegazing approach to music with the articulation of her records Engines of Hell and Music from the Bella Donna , producing something with the same emotional power as the longer tracks off of Smashing Pumpkin’s Melon Collie and the Infinite Sadness like “Thru the Eyes of Ruby” or “Porcelina of the Vast Oceans.” It’s arthouse alternative rock that uses its sophistication to make you feel something, feeling like being sucked into a well, enclosed in something hopeful even if it hurts. It’s music to become inarticulate to.

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Genghis Tron – “Nothing Blooms in the Hollow”

Genghis Tron have on their latest album finally answered their own identity crisis. Are they a metalcore band? Mathcore? Cybergrind? Prog metal? Psych rock? Krautrock? The answer: Yes. They have under their fingers the impeccable ability to groove so hard your heart bursts through the atmosphere into the cosmicism of wider space while still retaining the capacity to be so frantic and feral that it feels like you are burning alive. Their command of their instruments, now sharpened beyond reasonability, is something to be wielded toward making the Neil Peart drum fills or Queens of the Stone Age grooving work, not an end unto itself. They’ve never been better, something that we’ve been able to say every new release since their inception because its always, always true.

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_Originally reported by [Consequence](https://consequence.net/2026/06/heavy-song-of-the-week-mastodon-your-ghost-again/)._