Jason Crews is the owner and editor of INFRARED MAGAZINE and a Dallas–Fort Worth-based music journalist and concert photographer. Through INFRARED MAGAZINE and JASON CREWS PHOTOGRAPHY, he covers rock, metal, country, and live music with a focus on album reviews, artist features, concert coverage, and photography. His work is driven by a genuine passion for music and helping artists connect with new audiences through honest writing, strong visuals, and meaningful storytelling.
HELLYEAH ‘Hellyeah’
Rating: 9 / 10 Stars
HELLYEAH is: Chad Gray (vocals), Tom Maxwell (guitar), Greg Tribbett (guitar), Jerry Montano (bass), and Vinnie Paul (drums)
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REVIEW – There are supergroups that sound like collections of résumés, and then there are bands that sound like five guys found the same bottle, the same amplifier, and the same reason to make noise.
HELLYEAH falls firmly into the second category.
Arriving tomorrow, April 10, 2007 through Epic Records, the self-titled debut from HELLYEAH brings together Mudvayne vocalist Chad Gray and guitarist Greg Tribbett, Nothingface guitarist Tom Maxwell and bassist Jerry Montano, and former Pantera and Damageplan drummer Vinnie Paul. On paper, those names create expectations almost impossible for a new band to escape. In practice, HELLYEAH works because the musicians spend surprisingly little time trying to recreate the bands printed beside their names.
Instead, they sound like they are having a fucking blast.
Recorded at Chasin’ Jason Studios in Texas and produced by Vinnie Paul and Sterling Winfield with the band co-producing, HELLYEAH is built on down-tuned guitars, massive drums, Southern swagger, hostile grooves, alcohol, grief, brotherhood, and the kind of uncomplicated aggression that works because nobody involved sounds embarrassed by it.
The opening title track makes the mission statement immediately.
“HELLYEAH” does not gradually introduce the band. Chad Gray comes roaring through the door while Tom Maxwell and Greg Tribbett hammer away at a down-tuned twin-guitar attack and Vinnie Paul drops directly into the sort of thunderous groove that made his drumming instantly recognizable long before this band existed.
That groove is the record’s foundation.
Vinnie does not simply play underneath these songs. He pushes them. His double-bass work gives the title track its muscle, but the important part is the feel. Plenty of metal drummers can play hard and fast. Vinnie Paul makes heavy music swing.
That distinction becomes even clearer on “You Wouldn’t Know,” the album’s first single and one of its strongest songs.
Rather than relying exclusively on brute force, “You Wouldn’t Know” works around an angular push-and-pull riff that creates tension before opening into a much bigger melodic chorus. Gray demonstrates immediately that HELLYEAH will give him room to use more than his scream. His gritty clean delivery gives the chorus genuine lift before the bridge allows that familiar violence back into his voice.
The rhythm section is particularly tight here. Jerry Montano’s bass locks underneath Vinnie’s drums while the guitars repeatedly pull against the beat, creating one of the record’s most controlled arrangements.
It sounds like a radio song without sounding like somebody sat down and calculated one.
“Matter of Time” then darkens the atmosphere.
The guitars become thicker and more oppressive, trading some of the opening tracks’ immediate party atmosphere for a heavier, more brooding attack. Montano’s low end matters considerably here. His bass works directly with the kick drum, filling the space beneath those sludge-heavy riffs and giving the track a physical weight that is easy to underestimate until you concentrate on what is happening below the guitars.
Then comes “Waging War.”
This is where Vinnie Paul really starts throwing punches.
The tempo jumps, Gray loses almost all of the melodic restraint of “You Wouldn’t Know,” and HELLYEAH tear through one of the fastest and most confrontational tracks on the record. Vinnie’s double-bass performance during the verses is devastating, but once again it is the groove inside the speed that separates his playing from simple technical exhibitionism.
The man can make machine-gun kick drums feel human.
Four songs into the record, HELLYEAH have already established themselves as a legitimate heavy band.
Then “Alcohaulin’ Ass” arrives and explains why calling this project only a metal band misses half the point.
It begins with acoustic guitar and a gravelly country drawl from Gray, sounding more like something drifting from a Texas bar than a collaboration between members of Mudvayne, Nothingface, Pantera, and Damageplan.
Then the electric guitars hit.
The song turns into a swaggering mid-tempo hard-rock stomp without abandoning the Southern character of its opening. It is ridiculous, completely committed to its own premise, and almost impossible not to enjoy. The chorus is built for rooms full of people holding drinks over their heads, while the Southern-fried guitar work allows Maxwell and Tribbett to show another side of their chemistry.
If “You Wouldn’t Know” is the obvious active-rock single, “Alcohaulin’ Ass” feels like the song people are going to remember after the party is over.
“GodDamn” swings the record straight back toward brute force.
There is nothing particularly interested in subtlety here. The central riff repeats with the persistence of somebody kicking the same door until the hinges finally break, and Gray treats the microphone accordingly.
That simplicity is part of the appeal.
HELLYEAH understand that sometimes a riff does not need seventeen variations. Sometimes it just needs to hit hard enough to make a crowd move.
The 58-second acoustic interlude “In the Mood” becomes perfectly placed after that beating. Studio noise, laughter, and relaxed acoustic picking turn the track into less of a formal composition than a brief glimpse into the atmosphere surrounding the sessions.
That backyard camaraderie is important to HELLYEAH.
The album can be aggressive as hell, but it rarely feels miserable about being aggressive. Even its darkest moments exist inside a record whose larger personality feels communal.
“Star” brings the electricity back with bouncing, syncopated guitars and one of Gray’s more varied performances. He moves from restrained, almost haunted passages toward explosive vocals while Maxwell and Tribbett use the stereo space around the riffs to give the guitars movement instead of simply stacking distortion in the center.
“Rotten to the Core” is much less restrained.
This is HELLYEAH with a chip on its shoulder.
Gray sounds venomous, the guitars settle into a rigid mechanical pulse, and Vinnie once again controls the entire physical character of the song. The breakdown late in the track is particularly effective because he changes the feel without sacrificing the groove. It is one of those moments where the drums seem to alter the size of the room around the riff.
Then HELLYEAH suddenly reveals its emotional center.
“Thank You” is the record’s most vulnerable song by a considerable distance.
After so much drinking, aggression, bravado, and confrontation, the clean guitars and soaring melodic structure initially feel almost exposed. Gray responds with one of his most emotional vocal performances on the album, while the band allows distortion and heaviness to support the song rather than dominate it.
Loss hangs heavily over HELLYEAH’s existence, particularly with Vinnie Paul returning to recording following the death of his brother Dimebag Darrell, but “Thank You” does not reduce grief to one person or one event. It feels broader than that—a song about the people who are no longer standing beside you and the things you wish you had another chance to say.
That emotional weight makes the final chorus hit harder than another breakdown ever could.
“Nausea” refuses to let the record settle comfortably afterward.
At nearly five minutes, it is the longest track on the standard album and the point where some of the more experimental instincts associated with Mudvayne and Nothingface begin bleeding through the HELLYEAH framework.
Dissonant guitars create a claustrophobic atmosphere while the arrangement moves less predictably than the straightforward stomp of songs like “GodDamn.” It is ugly in exactly the way a song called “Nausea” should be.
Instead of another arena-ready hook, HELLYEAH allow the track to become unstable.
That choice matters because the album could easily have become too dependent on one formula. By the final stretch, the combination of booze anthems, rhythmic metal, radio hooks, emotional melody, and more dissonant experimentation has created something far less one-dimensional than the band’s initial image might suggest.
“One Thing” then closes the standard record by bringing everything back to forward motion.
The double bass starts rumbling again, the guitars return to a direct driving attack, and Gray finishes the album with the same defiant attitude that opened it.
Then it stops.
No drawn-out resolution. No grand closing statement.
Just silence.
It fits.
HELLYEAH is not an album interested in carefully explaining itself.
Its greatest strength is that these five musicians sound like they understand exactly why they are in the room together. There are recognizable pieces of their other bands—the rhythmic violence associated with Vinnie Paul, the vocal extremes of Chad Gray, the darker edges brought by the Nothingface and Mudvayne camps—but this does not sound like Pantera with a different singer, Mudvayne with Vinnie on drums, or Nothingface with additional firepower.
It sounds like HELLYEAH.
The production from Vinnie Paul and Sterling Winfield helps enormously. The guitars are thick without smothering everything beneath them, Montano’s bass retains enough presence to give the low end definition, and the drums have exactly the enormous physical character a record featuring Vinnie Paul should have.
Most importantly, the production preserves the looseness of the band.
This album sounds polished enough to compete with anything currently hitting active-rock radio, but it still feels like five musicians making noise together rather than five performances assembled on a computer.
There are certainly moments where the record’s whiskey-soaked attitude threatens to become excessive, but trying to remove that excess would miss the point.
HELLYEAH are not introducing themselves quietly.
They have made a debut about turning the amplifiers up, putting grief and anger through a wall of guitars, raising a glass to the people beside them, and finding out what happens when five musicians with very different histories stop worrying about those histories long enough to create something new.
“You Wouldn’t Know” proves the band can write a serious radio hook.
“Waging War” proves they can still draw blood.
“Alcohaulin’ Ass” gives them a personality completely separate from their previous bands.
“Thank You” proves the bravado has an emotional limit.
And throughout the record, Vinnie Paul sounds alive behind the kit again.
That alone carries enormous weight.
But HELLYEAH does not need sentimentality to justify its existence.
The songs do that.
If this debut is supposed to answer the obvious question of whether HELLYEAH are a real band or merely an all-star side project, the answer arrives tomorrow.
HELL yeah, they are.
For more information on HELLYEAH, visit:
www.HellyeahBand.net
www.Facebook.com/HellyeahBand
www.Twitter.com/HellyeahBand
www.YouTube.com/HellyeahBand
www.Instagram.com/HellyeahOfficial
