Enter Sand Man
Welcome Home, the sixth studio album from Hellyeah, is the last recording made by Pantera founder member and drummer Vinnie Paul Abbott, who succumbed to heart failure in June 2018 at the age of only 54. As Pantera fans will recall, his younger brother ‘Dimebag’ Darrell Abbott also died young, having been murdered on stage by a deranged gunman in 2004: That’s a whole lot of tragedy for one family.
Regrouping after their loss, Hellyeah have recruited sometime Stone Sour drummer Roy Mayorga, and are resuming their live schedule—but it’s a strange time for the band, understandably enough. Bassist Kyle Sanders, whose brother Troy plays bass in Mastodon, and is a regular in these pages, brings us up to speed with what’s going on.
It’s a sad time for your band, as well as an exciting one, presumably.
Extremely, yeah. Emotions are peaking on both ends, because there’s a lot of pride in everything that we pulled
