AUDIOTOPSY Feat. MUDVAYNE Members: 'Natural Causes' Album Details Revealed

AUDIOTOPSY, the new band featuring guitarist Greg Tribbett (MUDVAYNE, HELLYEAH),drummer Matt McDonough (MUDVAYNE),vocalist Billy Keeton (SKRAPE) and bassist Perry Stern, will release its debut album, "Natural Causes", on August 28 via Napalm. The CD was produced by the AUDIOTOPSY bandmembers at The Porch Studio in Orlando, Florida with engineer Tim Laud.

Says Greg: "The focus was to write solid, hooky, big riff songs. We didn't want to sound or look like every other band. It's not supposed to be regular. We're all building this vision together." Merging intricate instrumentation with a seamless knack for melody, they conjured up a style as heavy as it is hypnotic. "We got a vibe going", adds Greg. You could call it 'progressive hard rock.'"

The opening track from "Natural Causes", titled "Headshot", can be streamed using the SoundCloud widget below. The song pairs a slithering riff and steamrolling percussion with an anthemic punch. "It's from the point of view or the eyes of, not necessarily a soldier, but anybody who's in battle and in the trenches," states Billy. "Metaphorically speaking, it's life through the eyes of somebody fighting a battle."

"Natural Causes" track listing:

01. Headshot
02. All We Know
03. LYLAB
04. The Calling
05. H2O (Interlude)
06. Swim
07. Disguise Your Devils
08. Burn the Sky
09. Distorted
10. Darken the Rainbow
11. Frozen Scars
12. Natural Causes (Outro)

HELLYEAH and MUDVAYNE singer Chad Gray told Songfacts in a recent interview that he doesn't know if the latter group will ever work together again. Asked if there was a chance for MUDVAYNE to regroup, Gray said, "I don't know if the full band will. Who knows — they might be putting something else together. We were talking for a while and that whole Greg thing went down and everything kind of fell apart."

"The Greg thing" was the departure of Tribbett from HELLYEAH in 2013. Gray called his connection with Tribbett "the only truly solid relationship in [MUDVAYNE], although Matt and I are still great, Ryan [Martinie, bass] and I still briefly talk. I mean, the only way I personally would want to do MUDVAYNE is if everybody licked their wounds and got over it."

Gray said that there were "a lot of things" that tore MUDVAYNE apart, adding, "Maybe MUDVAYNE was the martyr for people that stopped supporting music. You sell 159,000 records the first week, and then the next record is like, 'Whatever, fuck it.'"

Gray admitted to Revolver recently that Tribbett's exit from HELLYEAH "was like losing a great friend… He has always been my right-hand man."

MUDVAYNE posted a message on Facebook one year ago saying that the band had not broken up and would be "back in action" at some point.

It's been more than five years since MUDVAYNE released its self-titled fifth album, which was barely promoted and sold weakly upon release.