Raymond Herrera | Back on drums after 16 years

One of the most copied double bass players in metal has sat down behind a kit for the first time since 2009.

That would be a story on its own. The complication is where he did it — and who replied two days later.

What actually happened

On 7 September, Angst Fabrik — the project fronted by former Fear Factory bassist and guitarist Christian Olde Wolbers — posted studio footage of Raymond Herrera tracking drums.

The caption did the work: “After 16 years away from the kit, the machine woke back up. Still runs.”

Worth being precise about what was and was not said. The post showed Herrera playing in a studio; it did not announce him as a permanent member. Adam Jarvis of Pig Destroyer and Scour was the drummer attached to the project when it was announced in early 2025, and nobody has said he has gone anywhere.

So: Herrera is on the record. Whether he is in the band is a different question, and one nobody has answered yet.

Sixteen years away doing what, exactly?

Not nothing.

Herrera’s last recorded drumming was Arkaea’s Years in the Darkness in 2009 — a band that also featured Olde Wolbers, which is the detail that makes this reunion less surprising than the headline suggests.

Since then he has been on the other side of the glass, placing and composing music for video games — credits running to somewhere north of sixty titles, including the Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter games and Scarface: The World Is Yours — plus a studio, a production company and a music-education non-profit.

Which is the bit drummers will find interesting. Sixteen years is not a lay-off, it is a change of profession. Coming back from that is a genuinely hard physical problem, and Herrera’s playing was never the forgiving kind.

His signature was the “stop-go” double bass approach — short, patterned bursts locked to the guitar riff rather than a constant flat-out roll. It is precise rather than fast for its own sake, and precision is exactly what goes first when you stop playing.

The part that makes it complicated

For anyone who has not followed Fear Factory’s paperwork, a quick map.

Herrera and Olde Wolbers are on one side of a split running since 2009, when Dino Cazares brought the band back without them. Lawsuits followed in both directions: a 2011 settlement licensed the name, and further litigation over unpaid sums ran into 2015. Burton C. Bell left in 2020, and Cazares has since said he acquired the remaining share of the name and owns it outright.

Fear Factory today is Cazares, bassist Tony Campos, singer Milo Silvestro and drummer Pete Webber, with a new album due through Nuclear Blast.

And Angst Fabrik is German for “fear factory”. Olde Wolbers has called the name a working title. Nobody has treated it as an accident.

Dino’s reply

Two days later, Cazares posted his own video: himself at a kit, captioned as “Dino” being back after sixteen long years playing the most difficult, insane Fear Factory beat ever.

It is a joke at the announcement’s expense, and it is not subtle. We are not going to adjudicate a seventeen-year-old dispute between four people, none of whom have asked our opinion.

But it tells you the temperature — and it means Herrera’s first drumming in sixteen years landed as a move in someone else’s argument rather than on its own terms. Which is a shame, because on its own terms it is the better story.

Final thoughts

Here is what we actually want: a full song.

A caption and a few seconds of studio footage tells you a man can still play. It does not tell you whether the stop-go feel survived a decade and a half of not using it, and that is the only question worth asking.

Angst Fabrik reportedly has fourteen songs in progress and a debut album pencilled for this year. If Herrera is on it, we will hear the answer soon enough.

To hear where that mechanical, riff-locked style went in other hands, try Tomas Haake and George Kollias — and our heel-toe kick technique lesson covers the mechanics if you fancy a go. For who is sitting where in 2026, Drummergeddon is our running scorecard.