Watch Mastodon’s Powerful ‘Show Yourself’ Performance on ‘Kimmel’
Mastodon gave a devastating performance of “Show Yourself” on Jimmy Kimmel Live Monday. Drummer Brann Dailor and bassist Troy Sanders delivered a thunderous dual vocal performance over Brent Hinds’ searing guitar solo.
“Show Yourself” appears on Mastodon‘s new LP, Emperor of Sand, a concept record that explores life, death, time, illness and doom through the story of a man who is handed a death sentence from a desert ruler and then wanders an arid wasteland.
However, “Show Yourself” has served as a respite of sorts from the album’s heavy and personal subject matter. Recently, Mastodon shared a campy video for the track in which a sad-sack Grim Reaper haphazardly tries to kill off the band. On the album, “Show Yourself” is also somewhat of an outlier, with Dailor telling Rolling Stone he wasn’t initially into the song’s simplicity.
“I guess there’s a part of me that doesn’t want to let people down, and I thought some of our most critical fans would frown on this version of us, so I wanted to sidestep it,” he said. “But Troy was really into it, so that started to sway me. And when I came up with the vocal pattern, it was really obvious and kinda sounded like Queens of the Stone Age to me. It was like, ‘Oh, we’re wearing a Queens costume.’ And I liked it. And once the album came into focus, it was like, ‘We need something like this.’ It’s like an oasis in a really dense record.”