Mastodon’s Brent Hinds Provides Update on New Band With High on Fire’s Matt Pike

Mastodon guitarist Brent Hinds and High on Fire / Sleep guitarist Matt Pike have been teasing their new band for nearly two years now. Pike’s wife, Alyssa Maucere-Pike, who is also involved in the project (and plays in Lord Dying), revealed last year that the pandemic stopped the project dead in its tracks. But now, according to Hinds, it seems things might finally be moving forward again.

Appearing on Jamey Jasta’s podcast, Hinds revealed that he’s written quite a bit of a material for the new band that he held back from the new Mastodon album, Hushed and Grim, which came out last week. He explained:

“I wrote way more songs that I chose not to put on the [new Mastodon] album because me and Matt Pike are starting a band together and we’re gonna work an album up and I’m gonna use a lot of that stuff for that. I kinda held back on purpose.”

Hinds went on to describe the project as “heavy, trippy and bluesy” and revealed that they plan to make a music video before the end of 2021.

Hinds also had some choice words for some previous tours Mastodon did, “like Disturbed and all that Mayhem stupid bullshit. Gay ass shit,” as well as a run “with Dying Fetus and some other fucking band. It was horrible. I didn’t want to do that tour.” Hinds is nothing if not honest, and unfortunately we’re not surprised to see him using a homophobic slur.

Maucere-Pike previously said of the project with Hinds and her husband:

“Well, it was supposed to ramp up here and it’s going a little slow now [due to] quarantine. ‘Cause I planned on going back there [to Brent‘s] after this next Sleep tour or something and hanging out and sitting down.
‘Cause we got some stuff done, but it wasn’t a major lot. But there’s definitely all these… there’s like two hours worth of ideas, it’s just putting them all together, you know? And feeling each other out and having different… We kind of want to make it like so we can have different people, like different bass players, different drummers, different singers, different people playing tambourine, whatever [laughs]. Like some sax guys… ‘oh, what’s that dude doing over there, he’s choking a goose!’” [imitates sax] [laughs]

We’ll update you on the band as soon as there is anything to update you on.