The band strayed away from their eccentric prog arrangements and went back to basics
On this day 15 years ago, Mastodon released their fifth album The Hunter.
The album signaled a significant change of direction for a band that had spent much of the previous decade constructing increasingly elaborate progressive-metal epics. After the dense conceptual ambitions of 2009’s Crack the Skye, Mastodon deliberately stripped away some of that complexity and, for the first time, made an album without an overarching concept. Guitarist Bill Kelliher later explained that the members were exhausted after extensive touring and wanted the writing process to be more spontaneous and enjoyable, with all four musicians contributing ideas rather than laboring for months over intricate arrangements.
Working with producer Mike Elizondo, whose eclectic résumé extended well beyond metal, the band recorded an album that retained its progressive instincts, crushing riffs and Brann Dailor’s extraordinary drumming while placing a greater emphasis on concise songwriting, memorable choruses and experimentation. The album’s title carried considerable personal significance: it honored guitarist Brent Hinds’ brother Brad, who had died while on a hunting trip in 2010, with the haunting title track serving as a particularly emotional tribute.
The Hunter immediately demonstrated its more direct approach with the punishing opener “Black Tongue,” followed by one of Mastodon’s most accessible songs, “Curl of the Burl,” a swaggering, groove-heavy track built around a massive riff and unusually immediate chorus. Other standouts included the frantic “Blasteroid,” psychedelic “Stargasm,” wonderfully eccentric “Octopus Has No Friends,” soaring “All the Heavy Lifting,” the atmospheric title track and the ferocious “Spectrelight,” while “Creature Lives” showed just how strange and adventurous Mastodon could remain even while simplifying its song structures.
The stylistic shift proved highly successful with critics. The Hunter holds a Metacritic score of 83 based on 29 reviews, with 25 classified as positive, while listeners represented on the site gave it an 8.4 user score. Critics generally praised Mastodon for becoming more accessible without abandoning the eccentricity, technical skill and heaviness that had established the band as one of its generation’s most important metal acts. Commercially, the record marked another step forward: it debuted at No. 10 on the Billboard 200 with more than 39,000 copies sold during its opening week, then the highest U.S. chart position of Mastodon’s career, while also reaching No. 19 on the UK Albums Chart.
Fifteen years later, The Hunter stands as a pivotal record in Mastodon’s evolution. Rather than attempting to make an even larger and more complicated sequel to Crack the Skye, the band proved it could compress its considerable musical vocabulary into shorter, more immediate songs without sacrificing its personality. That decision helped establish the broader sonic approach Mastodon would continue exploring on later records, where muscular hard-rock hooks, psychedelic textures, progressive arrangements and increasingly prominent clean vocals could comfortably coexist.
What initially seemed like a comparatively straightforward Mastodon album has aged into one of the clearest demonstrations of the band’s versatility: “Black Tongue” and “Curl of the Burl” remain among the defining songs of this period, while deeper cuts reveal just how experimental the record actually was beneath its accessible exterior. The strong critical response it received in 2011 has also endured—Metacritic still classifies the album’s reception as “universal acclaim.” On its 15th anniversary, The Hunter remains the sound of Mastodon refusing to repeat itself, trading the grand narrative of its earlier work for a colorful collection of individual songs and demonstrating that becoming more concise did not mean becoming less adventurous.
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