This past Friday, January 13th MASTODON celebrated their 12th anniversary. Niclas Müller-Hansen from Sweden's Metal Shrine spoke with drummer Brann Dailor about the event and what he remembers about being together as a band for the first time.

"When we actually got together and started making some noise the four of us, I remember being pretty excited," says Dailor. "We started learning each other’s songs and stuff like that and I was really excited to have… for Bill and myself, to have found Troy and Brent, so it came together like this weird package deal almost. There wasn't really any question about it. It was really sort of like 'Ok, yeah cool! This is our band! What are we gonna call our band? Mastodon! Ok, cool, done!', you know what I mean? It came together so fast and I moved to Atlanta on January 1 in 2000 and not even two weeks later, boom, I met these guys and we were off and running! We had a bunch of songs to kinda learn and work through, but we started booking a tour immediately and figuring out when we could go into the studio and record. It was really weird. I remember Bill and myself especially, being super motivated to wanna get back to touring because we'd just kinda been doing that for the last two years with Today is the day, so we knew that we could at least get to that level, back to that spot and use whatever contacts we had to do so. Relapse Records and things of that nature, so we told Relapse 'Hey, we're gonna go start something new!' and we stayed at Matt Jacobsen's house on the way down to Atlanta, so there you have it! We were excited to meet each other and all of our personalities and senses of humor clicked right off, so it was very easy.

Read the entire interview here.

Already confirmed to perform five shows as part of Soundwave 2012 - Australia's travelling festival that runs February 25th to March 5th - Mastodon has announced a pair of Sidewave headlining concerts down under.

Scheduled for February 27th in Melbourne at Billboard, and March 1st in Sydney at The Hi Fi, support on both shows will come from GOJIRA and KVELERTAK. Tickets go on sale December 15th.

Soundwave will play the following dates:

February

25 - Brisbane, Australia - Rna Showgrounds
26 - Sydney, Australia - Showground

March

2 - Melbourne, Australia - Showgrounds
3 - Adelaide, Australia - Bonython Park
5 - Perth, Australia - Claremont Showgrounds

For more info visit the festival’s website.