A few weeks back we reported that Testament was enlisting some heavy hitter hired guns to play drums on their new album due to an injury suffered by then-current drummer Paul Bostaph. The band got Chris Adler and Gene "The Machine" Hoglan to fill in on drumming duties for their new album, The Dark Roots of Earth, due early next year. Turns out, once Bostaph heals his injury, he ain't coming back!
Testament frontman Chuck Billy spoke to Terrorizer magazine explaining the departure:
"We just found our last week Paul Bostaph is not coming back to the band, he's starting his own new project and doing some things on his own," Billy told Terrorizer. "So we're actually going to be holding a couple of auditions with probably small group of drummers that we chose — we don't want to have a revolving drum stool, we have a new record we want a permanent drummer."
According to Chuck, the split with Bostaph is amicable. "We're still buddies," he said. "It's just that Paul feels at this point in his career he wants to be in a little more in control of the artistic creation of the songs and with his new project, they are all involved with that process whereas with our group, Eric [Peterson, guitar] is pretty much the main songwriter and that's just the way its been with us for 25 years."
Seems like Bostaph wasn't really getting to write anything in Testament and decided to leave to pursue something more creative. I'm glad to see there is no animosity from this, and everybody can get along. Once we hear of a new drummer, you better believe we'll report it here.
