Scott Kelly’s voice on “Fallen Torches” was always going to carry weight. That it became his final recorded collaboration with Mastodon before he withdrew from public life gives the track a heavier resonance now than it had on July 31, 2020, when it first dropped. The song opens Medium Rarities, the compilation Mastodon released September 11, 2020, via Reprise Records. A limited edition vinyl and digital collection, it is a deliberate excavation of the band’s sidestreets.
What is at stake here is not chart position or streaming numbers. What is at stake is memory. Mastodon has built a career on monolithic albums — Crack the Skye, Leviathan, Blood Mountain — but the work that falls between those landmarks often gets buried. Cover songs. Instrumental versions. Live cuts. The band chose to gather these fragments and press them into vinyl, making them physical, making them collectible. By August 15, 2022, the album had become a sought-after collector’s item. That is the point. Without this release, those tracks would have remained digital ephemera, scattered across streaming platforms and forgotten B-sides.
The tracklist is a map of Mastodon’s restlessness. Covers sit next to instrumental reworkings of their own material. Live recordings capture the band in rooms where the crowd noise is part of the song. “Fallen Torches” leads the collection, a new piece that features Scott Kelly of Neurosis. Kelly had collaborated with Mastodon before. This time, it was his last. The track is not a throwaway. It is a statement that the band can still write new music that fits alongside their deep catalog. That matters because compilations often function as graveyards. Medium Rarities functions as a showcase.
Mastodon has never been a band that stays still. Their sound shifts from album to album — sludge metal one year, prog rock the next, hard rock the year after that. The compilation makes that range explicit. One track is a cover. The next is an instrumental version of a song fans already know. The next is a live performance where the guitar feedback bleeds into the room. The album does not apologize for the variety. It presents it as the point.
The limited edition vinyl run created scarcity. Physical copies became hard to find. That is a risk the band took — pressing a finite number of records for a collection of rarities, knowing that some fans would never get one. The digital release ensured the music itself remained accessible, but the vinyl became the trophy. That dynamic changes how fans interact with the work. A song on a streaming playlist is background. A song on a limited vinyl pressing is an event.
Medium Rarities is a document of process. It shows what Mastodon does when they are not building an album. They cover songs they love. They strip their own work down to its bones. They step on stage and let the tape roll. The compilation captures those moments and fixes them in place. Without it, those moments would drift. The band understood that. They acted on it. The result is a record that does not pretend to be essential in the way a new studio album is essential. It is essential in a different way. It says: this is what we were doing when nobody was watching. And it matters.
