Brann Dailor is best known as the drummer-vocalist of the progressive-metal leviathan Mastodon. But true fans know that he’s much more than just a virtuosic drummer. He’s a driving creative voice behind the Grammy-winning Atlanta outfit — the glue that binds the band’s shared vocals and a key architect and songwriter behind their headiest concepts, from Moby Dick-inspired epics to astral-traveling Russian mystics to the souls of the dead inhabiting trees.
When he really wants to get weird, though, he returns to the synth-driven, sci-fi sprawl of his psychedelic prog-rock side project, Arcadea.
Built around Dailor (vocals and drums) and his lifelong friend Core Atoms (synths, guitar, bass vocoder and more) — Arcadea traffic in heavy grooves, intoxicating tones and adventurous compositions. While Dailor cites earthbound influences like Genesis and Black Sabbath, touchstones that echo throughout his entire career, Arcadea take those foundations to far more cosmic heights.
The band’s second and latest album, The Exodus of Gravity — a concept record set in a post-human universe five billion years in the future — proves these psychonauts have only just begun their ascent.
Fittingly, Arcadea’s far-out vision has its origins in another free-spirited era: the Nineties. Back then, Dailor was living in Rochester, New York — a rising percussionist in the technical death-metal group Lethargy, still years away from decamping to Atlanta to begin his long journey with Mastodon.
“There was all sorts of that stuff going on in the early Nineties,” recalls Dailor, “a lot of free expression — just letting your freak flag fly.”
One particular freakshow caught his attention: the local prog-rock outfit Gaylord. Dailor was especially magnetized by their left-handed guitarist Core Atoms, whose unconventional shredding style sat somewhere between heavy metal and Mr. Bungle-esque funkiness. It was a strange concoction that immediately appealed to Dailor. The spark of fascination quickly turned into friendship. Before long, Dailor joined the band behind the kit.
The drummer’s time in Gaylord was short-lived, but formative. He left the group shortly after recording their 1996 debut, Sparkling Cool — yet he and Atoms remained close friends as they both eventually made their way down south.
Cut to two decades later: Mastodon are prog-metal titans, and Atoms is now living in Atlanta. During a rare break in Mastodon’s relentless tour schedule, Atoms reached out to his old friend with an idea — he had a batch of synth-heavy songs and wondered if Dailor might want to bring them to life.
“I was gonna say yes regardless,” says Dailor, “because I just love Corey and I love playing with him and working with him. He’s just a really talented, brilliant artist and has a really great imagination. I listened to two or three songs that he had mapped out. I was like, ‘Oh man, this is, this is gonna be really cool.’”
As Dailor began tracking drums for what would become Arcadea’s 2017 self-titled debut, the project slowly but surely came together.
“Recording that first album took two years because I was just gone constantly,” he recalls of Mastodon’s rigorous touring schedule. “Every time I would peek back into Atlanta, [Corey] would hit me up: ‘Hey man, you wanna come over and play a couple more songs?’ So I would stop by and listen real quick and jump on the throne and lay down some drums, and then get outta there.”
Though his attention was largely focused on Mastodon, Dailor’s role in Arcadea naturally grew. He wasn’t just laying down drums — he also stepped behind the microphone to help bring Atoms’ conceptual sci-fi world to life. Collaborating with an old friend on something so different proved to be a refreshing creative reset and a nice break from his typical duties in Mastodon.
“I really love the first [Arcadea] record,” Dailor says. “He had a storyline worked out and we kind of went back and forth with lyrics, but he wrote the bulk of them. I was like, ‘Man, I’m tapped out. I wrote almost all the lyrics for the Mastodon record.”
A proggy, synth-laden kaleidoscope of a record, Arcadea arrived in 2017 (via Relapse Records) as undeniably otherworldly listen. But while Dailor was proud of the debut, his limited involvement — due to Mastodon’s non-stop schedule — left him wanting more. So when it came time to make a follow-up, he and Atoms took a more immersive approach.
“Corey and myself just went down in my basement and jammed the songs over and over again and got used to their arrangements,” says Dailor of the collaborative process. “It was just him and I doing that instead of being presented with something that’s already been recorded with a click track, and then I go in and just play drums along to it and then I leave. We mapped everything out and then we went over to [Mastodon’s] West End Sound and we knocked it out in a couple days.”
That hands-on process helped shape The Exodus of Gravity, a phantasmagorical, post-human sci-fi epic spun from the mind of Atoms. And as the scope of the lyrics grew, so did the band’s sonic ambition — pushing Arcadea into even more vivid, evolved and even dancey terrain.
“I said it out loud: I would love it to be more dancey instead of proggy, just because I wanna lay into some heavy grooves and have that come across more fun,” says Dailor. “We have this electronic band, we might as well make it dancey. I’m already in a prog-metal band. I wanted to [create] something groove-wise I could sink my teeth into.”
The result is an utterly groovy slice of psychedelic madness built on the instincts and chemistry of Dailor and Atoms.
“Music is music and you’re looking for an evocative response,” says the drummer. “I try to make sure that happens for me,” he explains.
The Exodus of Gravity was topped off with additional synth contributions from Mastodon live keyboardist João Nogueira, who helped bring the record across the finish line.
“[Nogueira] is such a skilled player, and he has a whole different setup as far as his keys are involved. That’s a whole bunch of different sounds that we could incorporate,” Dailor explains. “So he ended up playing on just about every single song except for one. It was the icing on the cake.”
So what’s next now that The Exodus of Gravity is ready for liftoff?
“I’m stoked to perform it live,” says Dailor. “I’ve got some ideas — I can see it. I’m excited to go out there and try them. It’ll be fun.”