HELLYEAH's TOM MAXWELL Explains Lack Of 'Party Metal' Songs On 'Blood For Blood'

Capital Chaos conducted an interview with HELLYEAH guitarist Tom Maxwell on February 8 in Sacramento, California. You can now watch the chat below.

Asked about the lack of "party metal" songs on HELLYEAH's fourth album, "Blood For Blood", Maxwell said: "I pretty much wrote everything on this album — musically, that is."

He continued: "I'm not a party metal dude. I'm a hardcore kid who doesn't have any ties to that hillbilly anthem shit. It's not a part of my psyche. You know what I mean?! So that kind of came… When [former HELLYEAH guitarist] Greg [Tribbett] was in the band, that's the kind of stuff he brought in. The kind of riffs that lent to that kind of writing, I would say. Where I'm a little bit more on the heavier, [more] extreme side of things — 'War In Me' type of stuff."

Maxwell added: "When [it was time to write] this album, it was just myself and Vinnie [Paul Abbott, drums] and Chad [Gray, vocals], and there is only person here that could actually write the music, so I just kind of took it by the balls and said, 'This is what we're gonna do.' And boom! Here it is."

Maxwell and Gray revealed in a separate interview with Loudwire that the band came close to breaking up before it finally parted ways with Tribbett and bassist Bob "Zilla" Kahaha. Maxwell explained, "They just pretty much had a lot of other stuff going on in their life that just took the focus of the band away, and for us to continue, we had to part ways with them. It was a toxic situation that almost broke the band up. They just couldn't get it together and it was a very painful time for us, it was very emotional, but I think, you know, with the love we have for each other and the band, we needed to kind of do the worst-case scenario and part ways with them."

Maxwell told The Pulse Of Radio that both Kahaha and Tribbett had their own specific issue that were hurting the group. "I don't think Bob ever really was as passionate about this band," he said. "He never became a full member or anything like that. It just didn't gel, so it was just time just to part ways, you know. And with Greg, I think he had just a lot of stuff that happened to him in his life in recent years that really affected him and became distracting for us and we just couldn't go forward."

Gray said that the recording sessions for "Blood For Blood" were emotionally volatile, saying, "This is such a heavy record on so many levels — it's not just the anger, the frustration, the angst, but its also the helplessness that we felt."

"Blood For Blood" sold around 17,000 copies in its first week of release to land at No. 18 on the Billboard chart. The band's previous effort, 2011's "Band Of Brothers", opened with 19,000 copies back in July 2012 to debut at No. 19.