Songfacts®:

• This is the opening track of American heavy band Mastodon's fifth studio album, The Hunter. Drummer Brann Dailor told Kerrang!: "Bill (Kelliher, guitar) and I came up with this. It's basically a big, bad ass riff that goes into a middle part with the same sort of vibe as Metallica's 'Orion.' It's a good opener and a really powerful song. It flows real nice and it just sounds totally evil and I love that. Usually we argue over what should open the record, but this time we knew."
• Kelliher told MusicRadar.com about the recording of his guitar solo: "The interesting thing about that solo is how I cut it – in a hotel room in France on my laptop. I play guitar on the whole song, really. Like I said, we did some things on this record separately. But it was really cool blazing through the solo all on my own in a hotel room across an ocean. I have Pro Tools on my laptop, so I laid it down, e-mailed it off to [producer] Mike Elizondo, and there it was - done."
  
  He added: "It's hard to get everybody in the same room sometimes, so that's the only reason why I'm playing it by myself. The second half of the solo was already there, but I had to put the first part on with only a few hours to go before we had to turn the record in to the label. I played it for the rest of the guys the next day, and they loved it. I'm pretty proud of that solo."
• According to NME, the song is a "loopy torture porn re-imagining" of the 2007 American fantasy action film 300.
• Mastodon teamed up with the London, England-based Signature Brew to create a custom beer named after this song. According to Signature Brew, Black Tongue is an 8.3% Double Black IPA and its, "rumbling smoky notes are offset by the elixir of misbehaving punchy hops. Mosaic and Magnum hops to the front, with Carafa Special 3 Malt and Pale on the baseline."