Heavy metal icons Pantera pull out of Sacramento’s Aftershock Festival. Here’s who will play instead

The legendary American heavy metal band Pantera will no longer perform at Sacramento’s Aftershock Festival in October, the festival announced Thursday.

“Due to circumstances beyond our control, we will be unable to perform at this year’s edition of Aftershock next month,” Pantera wrote on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter.

Another iconic group, albeit a few years newer, Stone Temple Pilots will take Pantera’s spot in the lineup to perform on Thursday, Oct. 5, the first of the four-day festival at Discovery Park.

Stone Temple Pilots, a mainstay of the alternative and grunge rock scene breaking out of San Diego in the 1990s, are known for hits such “Interstate Love Song” and “Plush.” The band is fronted by Jeff Gutt, who took the mic after original singer Scott Weiland died from a drug overdose on his tour bus in 2015.

Pantera dominated the hearts and ears of heavy metal fans for two decades beginning in the early 1980s with their neo-thrash tunes. The band, which had broken up in 2003, suffered through its own losses when, in 2004, band co-founder “Dimebag” Darrell Abbott, 38, was gunned down on stage by a fan during a Columbus, Ohio, concert for his subsequent band, Damageplan.

Another one of the four Pantera original members, Vinnie Paul Abbott, died in 2018. The drummer, whose distinctive sound complemented the band’s distinctive groove guitar ballads and was the younger brother of Darrell, succumbed to heart disease at age 54.

In late 2022, the remaining members of Pantera — Rex Brown and Phil Anselmo — revived the band to play such gut-bucket hardcore hits as “Walk,” “Domination” and “Cemetery Gates.” The resurrected rockers had toured Europe before Brown contracted COVID-19, and organizers scrapped several shows following an uproar over Anselmo’s past racist remarks, which included a Hitler salute at some shows.

Although Pantera is not able to attend this year, organizers said that the band will return for Aftershock 2024.