Wolfgang Van Halen digs rocking ‘From Dusk Till Dawn’ behind his new album

Wolfgang Van Halen may share a surname with late father Eddie and uncle Alex of Van Halen, but since dropping his 2021 debut, he’s quickly carved out his own musical path. He’s now following up his 2023 sophomore bow “Mammoth II” with “The End,” which was released in October.

Along the way, the 34-year-old multi-instrumentalist has topped a trio of Billboard magazine charts, toured with Metallica and the Foo Fighters and earned a Grammy nod. He’s had a lot to deal with in the five years since his father passed away from cancer at the age of 65 and, as has been his way, the younger Van Halen has used music to cope with stress and anxiety.

More recently, the music he created for “The End,” which he’ll be touring behind when he plays the Tabernacle on Saturday, was predominantly spurred by his navigating the California wildfires earlier in the year.

“Usually, my outlet for music is a way to kind of work through emotional trauma, stress and anxiety,” he explained. “This one was no different. I wrote and recorded this album in the midst of the fires occurring in January. It was very tough because I had a U-Haul packed with all my dad’s things. I had the Frankenstein (guitar) in my car just sitting and waiting for any given opportunity in case Watch Duty (volunteer fire watch service) showed up and told us to get out. We were ready to go. It wasn’t a very creatively flourishing environment.”

Wolfgang Van Halen tours with a full lineup of Mammoth, but in the studio cutting "The End," he operated more like a one-man band. (Courtesy of Travis Shinn)

For this latest chapter of his band, Van Halen shortened his band name simply to Mammoth, dropping the WVH that initially followed it. “I’ve always said that was the intention and I’m happy to give the opportunity to have someone hear a song and not know who it is,” he said.

And while the road version of the band finds Van Halen leading a crew rounded out by guitarists Frank Sidoris and Jonathan Jourdan, bassist Ronnie Ficarro and drummer Garrett Whitlock, in the studio, he remains a one-man operation. For “The End,” he changed gears by steering away from composing demos on his computer, instead demoing the parts in real time by literally running back and forth between instruments. It proved to be a great creative release valve.

“It was a really fun, immediately rewarding experience that I think this is the way that we’re probably going to be doing it,” he said. “It was a nice way to turn your brain off and you get to fully immerse yourself in the moment.””

The 10 resulting songs are a cathartic explosion of aggressive expression that comes across in jams ranging from the thunderous “Selfish” and its maelstrom of bass lines and jackhammer rhythms to the Pantera-flavored stomp of “Same Old Song” and to the choppy groove offensive that is “The Spell.”

The album’s centerpiece is the title track, which goes from a two-hand tapping intro to a wondrous roller coaster of frenetic time changes riding a relentless tempo.

While it’s a flavorful auditory ride, the accompanying video, inspired by Robert Rodriguez’s 1996 vampire film “From Dusk Till Dawn” and cocreated by the filmmaker and Van Halen, is a throwback to the glory days of 1980s MTV. The partnership evolved out of Rodriguez seeing Mammoth at an Austin, Texas, show and the two men sharing their respect for each other’s work.

“Robert kind of saw a kindred spirit in me because he himself wears a lot of hats when he makes a movie,” Van Halen explained. “He edits his own movies, does the scores. … ‘From Dusk Till Dawn’ is one of my favorite movies and we kind of hit it off over the past couple of years. I went to his house the next time I was there and showed him what I was working on, and he completely dug it.

“The next time I saw him I asked if he would be down to do a video and he said, ‘Absolutely.’ I sent him the song ‘The End’ and he was super down. He came to my house and it was just really funny to see the amount of talent being used on such a silly music video. He wrote this whole treatment out and a script after I told him my idea. It just kind of snowballed into this amazing, epic, two-day shoot. … It was pretty insane.”

Coming off his recent stint opening for Creed and gearing up for a headlining tour, Van Halen is looking forward to incorporating those audio-visual elements into his live show.

“For the headline tour, we have a lot of fun stuff planned,” he said. “We’ve added some more visual aspects now that we’ve been mostly a performance-first band” — with a take-no-prisoners approach to playing.

“This time we have a screen and it’s going to be pretty cool. We’re going to have a good light show to make it a little prettier.”

As for the set list, he wants to go heavy on new material. “Since we’re still a baby band, I feel like we should be allowed to.”

If it sounds like Wolfgang Van Halen is ready to rock while rolling through tour stops with Mammoth, that’s right.

“I’m stoked,” he said.

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