All That Remains vocalist Phil Labonte spoke on last month’s passing of the band’s guitarist Oli Herbert in a recent chat with WRIF. Speaking to Meltdown from the station, Labonte said:
“I was shocked. He was 44 years old, and he wasn’t really a big partier. He would go hang out with people and stuff, but he didn’t really do a lot of drinking… He didn’t do drugs, he didn’t really drink a lot. He would smoke pot once in a while, but that was the extent of it. And so, yeah, it was a big shock. And we’re still processing it and trying to figure out how it is that we move forward and what that means and stuff. So… it sucks.”
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Labonte also commented of the band’s decision to move on without Herbert, offering:
“We’re gonna continue on. The band is not gonna end. It’s gonna be different and it’s gonna be weird. We’ve got someone that’s filling in for this European trip that we’ve got coming up at the end of the month.
And he is the guy that Oli would have wanted to fill in, to replace him. And then we’ll start looking for a full-time replacement, I assume, shortly. ‘Cause we’ve got stuff that we wanna do next year.
We don’t wanna let the [new] record be pushed aside. Oli would have wanted us to play the songs. He was excited about the way the record sounded and he was excited about a lot of the stuff on it, so he wouldn’t want us to stop.
So we’ve just gotta figure out what that actually looks like and how we do that.”
The band recently tapped guitarist Jason Richardson to fill-in on their immediate touring in support of their just released new album, “Victim Of The New Disease“. Richardson had previously rose to fame amongst the ranks of Born Of Osiris and Chelsea Grin and more recently has been performing and recording solo.
Meanwhile, Herbert‘s death was confirmed by his widow to have been the result of drowning, in part due to a combination of anti-depressants and a sleep aid found in his system. Herbert‘s body was found in a pond nearby his Stafford Springs, CT home on October 16th, 2018.
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