{"id":583308,"date":"2026-08-28T19:44:09","date_gmt":"2026-08-28T19:44:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/583308\/"},"modified":"2026-08-28T19:44:09","modified_gmt":"2026-08-28T19:44:09","slug":"heavy-song-of-the-week-mastodons-barbarians-blood","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/583308\/","title":{"rendered":"Heavy Song of the Week: Mastodon’s “Barbarian’s Blood”"},"content":{"rendered":"

Heavy Song of the Week<\/a> 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 album track \u201cBarbarian\u2019s Blood\u201d from Mastodon.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s with vicious drums that Mastodon opens their newest album\u00a0Marrow Deep<\/a>, bringing to mind a more savage variant on the ripping drums that opened\u00a0Blood Mountain 20 years ago. That sense of mythic murk and magical heavy metal of the Blood Mountain era continues across the build of the song toward its first eruptive chorus. The hunger of their third studio album, the one that followed their breakthrough in\u00a0Leviathan, their first on a major label, the one that would determine whether they had a future or not, is felt again here. You can feel the weight they bear. They have to honor a fallen brother as much as they have to defend their ability to continue to exist, to find vitality in death. The eruptive force here is akin to Crack the Skye, an album likewise born out of explicit grief and the loss of a sibling. Similarly, we see a marked transformation on \u201cBarbarian\u2019s Blood.\u201d<\/p>\n

The transformation here, however, is more complete and all-encompassing. Rather than signaling a shift in their sound\u00a0toward something, \u201cBarbarian\u2019s Blood\u201d feels like a total compendium of who they have been. There is a beatdown riff closer to\u00a0Call of the Mastodon or\u00a0Remission, tight thrashy riffs from\u00a0Leviathan, the wider rich atmospheres of their previous two records, and all capped by a keyboard solo from their new official keyboard player that feels genuinely new. \u201cBarbarian\u2019s Blood\u201d is a statement, proof the band can still do every last single thing you\u2019ve ever heard them do, do them well,\u00a0and have yet more in the tank that we\u2019ve never seen. It\u2019s the perfect opener not just to a new album but a new era of the band and one of many reasons\u00a0Marrow Deep is likely to go down as being just as important as those magical first four albums of theirs. It\u2019s our Heavy Song of the Week.<\/p>\n

Related Video<\/p>\n

Honorable Mentions<\/p>\n

Gorod \u2013 \u201cSigns\u201d<\/p>\n

Looking at this as a progressive death metal song misrepresents it more than a bit. While the vocals certainly live in that space between extreme metal and hardcore that a lot of great bands draw from, the music is much closer to the prog metal of a band like Dream Theater or Protest the Hero. The riffs zig and zag in unexpected ways, the drums live in the realm of exciting off-beat accents and syncopation more than laying a backbeat, and the twin guitars play countermelodies that weave a much more robust sonic picture than cliched twin leads or mere drop tuned chugging. There is an Opethian sense of grandeur matched by gnarly riffs that absolutely beg you to stankface and head bang to the odd rhythms. Intellectual framing fails; this song is\u00a0sick, straight up.<\/p>\n

Lugubrious Garment \u2013 \u201cProfaned Fountain of Leaden Waters\u201d<\/p>\n

What a wild mixture of elements. The opening tricks you into thinking what\u2019s to come is a vicious black metal ripper. Then, the death metal riffs come in, only to quickly be subsumed into a straight-up Mastodon groove. There are lines delivered in pure Serj Tankian worship, proggy swells and countermelodies, and punky D-beat mayhem. This is an encyclopedia of heavy music that cuts across such a wide spectrum that it betrays a real love rather than a desire to appear cool which in turn makes it\u00a0very cool. The utter charisma of the performance is infectious, feeling more like being present in a jam room or a punk basement show where a band achieves the flowstate, hopping riff to riff seemingly at random but with every choice just being\u00a0right. It\u2019s perfect.<\/p>\n

Shy, Low \u2013 \u201cPurity Spiral\u201d<\/p>\n

Digging through singles can sometimes be dire work. That\u2019s what makes encountering something like \u201cPurity Spiral\u201d so special. Way back when, post-metal was often called \u201catmospheric sludge,\u201d alluding the Neurosis-derived heft to the material. While for many bands, that element wore away to be replaced by increasingly banal post-rock elements, Shy, Low have remained in tight contact with that essential emotional brutality. You can practical hear the bellowed vocals that would over this if only they had a singer, especially given its rather shapely composition despite being over 9 minutes long. It\u2019s a piece that follows the dictum of emotionality rather than a pre-ordained verse\/chorus structure, which makes those recurrent elements feel well-earned rather than forced. This is just frankly an incredible piece of music that has placed a band I didn\u2019t know existed well onto my map.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Heavy Song of the Week is a feature on Heavy Consequence breaking down the top metal, punk, and…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":583309,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[156,157,111,139,69],"class_list":["post-583308","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-music","tag-entertainment","tag-music","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/583308","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=583308"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/583308\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/583309"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=583308"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=583308"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=583308"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}