Brent Hinds was a force of nature and a mass of contradictions. He was a classically trained guitarist with the mercurial swagger of an old-school rock’n’roll wildman. He spent 25 years singing and playing guitar in Mastodon, one of the defining metal bands of the 21st century, yet professed to hate metal. He could be volatile, sweet, fucked-up, philosophical and a million other things, sometimes all at once.
“Brent was one of the last truly bigger-than-life personas that I know in the game,” says William DuVall, Alice in Chains frontman and Brent’s bandmate in 2010s supergroup Giraffe Tongue Orchestra. “He was a genuine, unforgettable, lunatic presence. There are very few people that you’ll ever meet that keep it that real and that live that close to the edge all the time.”
