Marlon Browden grew up in St. Louis, Missouri. Beyond that, the early record is thin: no birth date, no school, and no teacher has been documented in any published source, and he has no Wikipedia entry. The Discogs artist file describes him simply as a jazz drummer originally from St. Louis, and the biographies circulated by the Berlin venues that book him say only that he absorbed the American music he grew up around before going to work. His first catalogued session is pianist Shedrick Mitchell's self-released Introducing Shedrick Mitchell in 1997, which places him in New York by the second half of the 1990s.

The five years that follow are the densest stretch of his discography, and they run across the whole width of the late-1990s New York scene rather than sitting in one corner of it. He held the drum chair in the Argentine composer Guillermo Klein's ensemble Los Guachos for Los Guachos II, recorded February 4 and 5, 1999 and issued by Sunnyside, and again for Los Guachos III in 2002. In 1999 he toured in a John Scofield quartet with Matt Garrison on bass and Will Boulware on organ, a band Jambands later credited with making the A Go Go material its own and whose drummer it described as "a fantastic blend of jazzy high hat and steady groover." He recorded Luciana Souza's The Poems of Elizabeth Bishop and Other Songs at Avatar Studios in 2000, bassist Reid Anderson's The Vastness of Space at the same room on March 30 and 31 of that year, and Greg Osby's Blue Note album Symbols of Light (A Solution) at Systems Two in Brooklyn on January 28 and 29, 2001. In parallel he was the drummer on the trip-hop collective Wax Poetic's Doublemoon albums Three (1998) and the Atlantic-distributed self-titled record of 2000, the latter the album on which Norah Jones sang before her own career started. His name also appears in a place he does not play: he is a co-writer of the title track of the John Scofield Band's Überjam (Verve, 2002), credited alongside Scofield, Avi Bortnick and Jesse Murphy, with Adam Deitch on the drum stool.

He led his own date in the middle of that run. Marlon Browden Trio was cut at Avatar Studios in New York on December 14 and 15, 2000 and released by Fresh Sound New Talent as FSNT 115, with Pete Rende on piano and Wurlitzer and Matt Pavolka on bass. Four of the seven pieces are Browden's; the covers are Björk's "The Anchor Song," a Guillermo Klein tune, and Miles Davis material, a set list that says most of what the record is trying to do. Fresh Sound's own copy called him "one of a growing number of young drummer/leaders" and pointed to the rock, funk and singer-songwriter habits he brought into an instrumental trio. The label brought him back as a co-leader for The Omer Avital Marlon Browden Project (Fresh Sound World Jazz FSWJ 031), taped live on July 13, 2003 and released in 2005, a quartet with Omer Avital on acoustic bass, Omri Mor on Fender Rhodes and Avishai E. Cohen on trumpet and effects. It opens with a Browden feature called "Marlonious" and includes "Browden's Thing." Between the two he recorded the nonet on Avital's leader debut Think With Your Heart (Fresh Sound New Talent FSNT 104, 2001) and the quartet on Jason Lindner's Live/UK, a BBC broadcast from Pizza Express in London recorded in 2001 and issued by Sunnyside in 2004 with Jimmy Greene on saxophones and Avital on bass. In 2004 he took the drum chair in Vernon Reid's band Masque for Known Unknown, cut at Studio 900 in New York and released by Favored Nations, with Leon Gruenbaum on keyboards, Hank Schroy on bass and DJ Logic guesting on one track. He was still working with Reid a decade later, playing a trio with Reid and saxophonist Oliver Lake at The Stone in New York on October 21, 2014.

Browden later moved to Berlin, where he has been based for at least the last decade. The year of the move is not confirmed. He plays there in his own formats rather than as a hired drummer: an acoustic trio at the Zig Zag Jazz Club with saxophonist Ignaz Dinne in 2017, a duo of bass loops and drums with the New Zealand pianist Jonathan Crayford at ausland, and a solo project he calls "Instrumental," which the venues describe as a trance music experience and in which he sings as well as drums. He was photographed at the drums at the United States Embassy Berlin's Independence Day celebrations in 2015 and 2016. Recording work continued alongside it: drums on the Berlin film soundtrack Above and Below (2015), a guest appearance on Matte Henderson and Marco Minnemann's The Veneer of Logic (2013), and drums on two tracks of Yusuf / Cat Stevens's King of a Land (Dark Horse, 2023), "All Nights, All Days" and "Another Night in the Rain." His own promotional biography adds appearances on Saturday Night Live and the German television series Ku'damm 63; neither has been independently confirmed here.

The consistent thing said about Browden by the people who hired him is range rather than a signature. Fresh Sound's description of "fiery, limber playing" behind Greg Osby and Reid Anderson, and Jambands' pairing of a jazz hi-hat with a steady groove in the Scofield quartet, are describing the same drummer, one whose swing feel and backbeat feel are equally usable. That is why the same five years take in Guillermo Klein's written large-ensemble music, a Blue Note post-bop date, a Brazilian song project, a nine-piece Israeli-American front line, and a downtown trip-hop record with a live band. His own trio record is the clearest statement of preference: short melodic pieces, a lot of space, Björk and Miles Davis treated as equivalent source material, and drums used to shape the form rather than to solo over it. The Berlin work has pushed further in that direction, toward loops, electronics and his own voice, and away from the sideman role entirely.