Brann Dailor

Brann Dailor is Mastodon's drummer and one of its three vocalists, a member since the band's founding in 2000. Born in Rochester, New York, in 1975, he came from Today Is the Day together with Bill Kelliher — the two moved to Atlanta and there met Brent Hinds and Troy Sanders. His drumming is an anomaly. Dailor barely keeps time at all: he plays in continuous fills, displacing accents and filling every bar with variation, as though the instrument were a lead rather than a foundation. In a band whose songs are already made of irregular metres, this ought to destroy the structure — and the opposite happens, because he keeps the internal pulse intact while everything above it moves. It is the group's most imitated and least reproducible trait. From The Hunter (2011) onward he also took on lead vocals, and his clean, melodic voice — audible on "Oblivion" and "The Motherload" — opened Mastodon to an audience the rest of the repertoire did not reach. Crack the Skye (2009) is his work in another sense: the album's concept grew out of the death of his sister Skye, who took her own life at fourteen. It is the band's most personal record and one of the few cases in metal where grief was addressed explicitly and by name.