Watch: MASTODON Played "Crusher Destroyer" Live For The First Time Since 2014

Jun 19, 2023

It crushed and destroyed.

By

Published

Mastodon has really been digging deep into their older stuff lately. The band recently broke out "The Wolf Is Loose" and "Circle Of Cysquatch" off Blood Mountain for the first time since 2017, and now they're going even further by playing "Crusher Destroyer" off Remission for the first time in damn near a decade. Watch footage from the May 4 show at the Sunset Cove Amphitheater in Boca Raton, FL above.

As for new Mastodon, drummer Brann Dailor recently said Mastodon isn't just writing short and punchy songs for the sake of writing short and punchy songs. Instead, Dailor said Mastodon would like to steer away from the longer and more dramatic songs found on their most recent albums, and focus on music that's "a little shorter and a little punchier." And in the world of modern Mastodon, "shorter" could mean three or four minutes.

"That's not necessarily a desire of mine, so, speaking off the cuff, I think that's what one member wants to do," said Dailor. "Whatever the committee decides is good. You can talk all day long about what you want to do in the band and what you want things to sound like, but when you sit down and start writing stuff, you just go for what you dig and things fall into place per usual. Before you know it, you do end up having a 14-minute song on your hands.

"It's not something that you really pay too much attention to. You don't really watch the clock when you're writing music, you just put things together. When things feel right with the way that they're strung together and when everybody's happy with the results and it feels good in the room and we jam through it, you're like, 'Yeah, that's awesome.'

"Then you check it and go, 'Hey, how long was that?' And you're like, 'Oh, it was eight minutes long. Okay, sweet.' You wouldn't trim anything off of it because it felt right. But if it's like 'Crusher Destroyer,' it ends up being one minute and 59 seconds. That also felt right as well, so we have plenty of examples of short, fast, punk-sounding heavy songs in our catalog to go along with the epics.

"It's usually about striking a balance between the two. We always have the big epic and it just so happened that the last album was a very grand gesture to a lost friend of ours. It ended up being a little bit more melancholy at times. What Bill [Kelliher] was kind of referencing was the fact that we just wanted to make something a little shorter and a little punchier and just go out swinging for the next one. That's the intent."

Mastodon is currently on tour with Gojira and Lorna Shore, which you can catch at one of the dates below. Get your tickets here.

4/18 Portland, OR Veterans Memorial Coliseum4/20 Concord, CA Concord Pavilion4/21 Los Angeles, CA The Forum4/22 Phoenix, AZ AZ Federal Theatre4/23 Las Vegas, NV Virgin4/26 Dallas, TX The Pavilion at Toyota Music Factory4/28 Houston, TX 713 Music Hall4/29 Austin, TX Moody Center4/30 Oklahoma City, OK Zoo Amphitheatre5/2 Nashville, TN Municipal Auditorium5/4 Boca Raton, FL Sunset Cove Amphitheater5/5 St. Augustine, FL St. Augustine Amphitheatre5/6 Atlanta, GA Ameris Bank Amphitheatre5/7 Asheville, NC Harrah’s Cherokee Center5/9 Richmond, VA Virginia Credit Union Live5/10 Baltimore, MD Pier Six Pavilion5/11 Reading, PA Santander Arena8/9 Cincinnati, OH MegaCorp Pavilion8/10 Cleveland, OH Jacob’s Pavilion8/11 Pittsburgh, PA Stage AE Outdoors8/12 New York, NY Coney Island Amphitheater8/13 Syracuse, NY OneCenter8/15 Detroit, MI Masonic Temple8/17 Toronto, ON RBC Echo Beach8/18 Montreal, QC Place Bell8/19 Portland, ME Cross Insurance Arena8/20 Boston, MA MGM Music Hall8/23 Milwaukee, WI BMO Pavilion8/25 Hammond, IN Horseshoe8/26 Omaha, NE Westfair Amphitheater8/27 Minneapolis, MN Waite Park Amphitheater8/29 St. Louis, MO The Factory8/30 Kansas City, MO Azura Amphitheater9/1 Salt Lake City, UT USANA Amphitheater9/2 Denver, CO Fiddler’s Green Amphitheater

Enter your information below to get a daily update with all of our headlines and receive The Orchard Metal newsletter.

Subscribe

Metal makes everything sound better.

Picks from throughout their entire career!

"We just wanted to make something a little shorter and a little punchier."

One might say the wolf has become loose.