“Five years ago, I played my last show… Shortly after this show I was declared dead, but doctors brought me back to life,” Mat Sinner revealed in a frank social media update earlier this year. The Primal Fear co-founder and bassist had been through a nightmare: a severe adverse reaction to a COVID-19 vaccine in 2021 left him hospitalized for eight months, at one point even flatlining before being resuscitated. As he lay paralyzed in a hospital bed, Sinner fixated on a single goal: “one day I want to be back rocking on a stage again!”
It was this dream – just one more show – that kept him fighting through rehab and recovery. Now, against all odds, that dream has come true. After four and a half years away from the spotlight, Mat Sinner finally made his return to live performance with Primal Fear’s new lineup, an experience he likens to “a jump in ice-cold water”.
Stepping back on stage was nothing short of emotional for the German metal veteran. “I didn’t play a show in four and a half years,” Sinner notes, so when the moment finally arrived he told himself, “If you don’t try it now, you will never know if you are able to do it or not”. With determination, he pushed forward. Primal Fear’s first comeback show – May 9, 2025 in Germany – was a milestone: Sinner performing again after five years of dealing with severe health issues.
The band even kept a chair at the ready for him at stage side in case his stamina gave out, but Sinner never needed it. Once the lights hit and the fans roared, he found his stride. “I felt good and the show went great,” he says proudly. “The people were great, the audience fantastic… I enjoyed what I missed the last four and a half years”. It was, by all accounts, a triumphant return – one that Sinner himself still finds almost miraculous.
New Blood and New Beginnings for Primal Fear
That May 2025 concert was also Primal Fear’s first with a partially renewed lineup, and it came on the heels of major internal turmoil for the band. In late 2024, long-serving members of Primal Fear abruptly parted ways with the group – a shake-up that “surprised everyone,” as the departure came with little warning. Sinner doesn’t hide how that period felt:
“Bad,” he says simply, “because we played together for a long, long, long time”. The split was triggered by what he perceived as a lack of passion and ambition among some bandmates. While he avoids going into excessive personal detail, Sinner reveals that one of the guitarists made disparaging comments at the time – remarks Sinner calls “ridiculous… very evil”.
Having just recovered enough to rejoin the band full-time, Mat was in no mood to tolerate negativity. “Everything [was] said, why should I make music with a guy who [doesn’t] wanna make music with me?” he thought. “It’s that easy.” As co-founders, he and vocalist Ralf Scheepers own the Primal Fear name – and they didn’t hesitate to act. “I said, I only continue without this guy,” Sinner recalls, bluntly. The guitarist was promptly told he was no longer wanted – “in evil speech, we fired him,” Mat says with a wry frankness.
The fallout didn’t end there. “Then the other guitarist, a very close friend of mine since 30 years, he decided that his future is better with him and he left the band,” Sinner recalls. What hurt even more was the fate of a project close to his heart: “because he thought they can do his project — Rock Meets Classic which was once my project, which they stole away from me.” Looking back, Mat admits, “It’s a sad story, but that’s life.”
Yet from this turbulence came a chance to start anew. With two guitarists gone, Sinner and Scheepers quickly regrouped. In fact, they seized an opportunity that had long been brewing in the background. For years, Swedish guitarist Magnus Karlsson had been a secret weapon for Primal Fear – a prolific songwriting partner with Mat and Ralf, who contributed to albums and was technically part of the band, though he often remained a behind-the-scenes member. According to Sinner, the previous guitarists had “always fought” against Magnus joining the live lineup, perhaps out of jealousy that “me and Ralf [were] writing with him most of the songs”. Now, free of that resistance, “we knew Magnus is back,” Mat says. There was never any doubt that Karlsson – “we know how good he is” – would step in as a full-time touring guitarist going forward.
The drummer’s throne, meanwhile, was already in capable hands. André Hilgers, a veteran of the German metal scene (ex-Rage, Axxis, etc.), had filled in as Primal Fear’s touring drummer on the last pre-shakeup tour. With the old lineup imploding, Hilgers was simply brought officially on board – “that was not new. It was easy to decide,” Sinner notes of confirming André as an official member. The final piece of the puzzle was finding a second guitarist to partner with Magnus. Rather than rush the decision, Sinner proceeded cautiously – burned once, he was determined not to repeat past mistakes. “After the last trouble we had, I was really looking out… I have to first check everything, that I’m 100% sure it would be the right move,” he explains. “I don’t want to change guitarists again in six months or so. I need the feeling that this could stay for [a] longer time.”
Enter Thalìa Bellazecca, a young guitar phenom known from the Italian power metal scene. Sinner and his crew auditioned Thalìa and were immediately impressed. “We checked her out and she played well,” he says. More importantly, she proved to be “a super nice person, a great talent, and fits very well” with the group. Integrating a 25-year-old woman into a band of four veteran men could have been awkward, but Mat insists it’s been an energizing change. Thalìa had “to get in this band with four guys who are older than her,” Sinner chuckles, but he notes that having a female guitarist on stage is “not bad” for Primal Fear’s audience dynamics either. At their shows, “70% of the audience are male”, Mat points out, so he jokes that “Thalìa is by far not ugly… She looks good. She moves good. So it’s nice for the male audience to watch [a] young, impressive guitarist like Thalìa rather than watch me all the time!” He delivers that line with a self-deprecating laugh, but he’s genuinely proud of his new guitarist’s star power – and the fans seem to agree. Once Bellazecca was announced, the band’s social media “numbers were exploding,” Sinner says, “and 99% of the comments were super positive” about the lineup addition.
Primal Fear’s 2025 lineup celebrates a new chapter for the band. Right to left: guitarist Magnus Karlsson, vocalist Ralf Scheepers, drummer André Hilgers, bassist Mat Sinner (front) and guitarist Thalìa Bellazecca (rear). With fresh faces and renewed chemistry, the group exudes “a good vibe… very friendly, very peaceful, very creative” on and off stage.
With Magnus, Thalìa, and André now joining Ralf and Mat, Primal Fear has emerged from the tumult reinvigorated. Sinner is visibly relieved that the interpersonal strain of the previous era has lifted. “We’ve played three shows now together, and all the festivals went super cool and everybody’s happy,” he reports enthusiastically. The chemistry within the band is night-and-day compared to before. “A good vibe in the band, very friendly, very peaceful, very creative,” Sinner says of the current atmosphere. There’s a sense of a weight being lifted; the mistrust and cliques of the old lineup are gone. “Everybody’s super happy at the moment,” Mat adds, knocking on wood with a laugh.
Old-School Values in a High-Tech Era: Sinner on AI and Music
Apart from navigating health scares and band drama, Mat Sinner has also been grappling with the rapid transformations in the music industry. As a 40-year veteran of metal (Mat co-founded Primal Fear back in 1997, and his career stretches even further back with his first band Sinner in the ’80s), he’s witnessed the evolution from vinyl to cassette to CD, from downloads to streaming. But even for someone so seasoned, the current moment presents challenges that feel unprecedented. “Right now we’re going through two major changes which are affecting the industry,” journalist and photographer Jovan Ristić interviewer posits to him. “One is social media – songs being created for TikTok… and the other being AI.”
Sinner’s stance on these modern phenomena is clear: he doesn’t exactly embrace them. Take streaming and social media, for example. Mat isn’t shy about calling out the downsides of the Spotify age. “I’m not a big friend of Spotify, to be honest,” he admits bluntly. From an artist’s perspective, the economics of streaming are abysmal – a “big black hole” for musicians. Songwriters and performers, Sinner argues, are “super underpaid” by streaming platforms. He paints a vivid picture of royalty statements “over 600 pages” listing countless micro-transactions, each stream earning “0.000012 cent” (yes, far less than a penny). It’s an opaque, exhausting system that clearly frustrates him. “The system is not working for me,” Sinner sighs. “I have to live with it because I still love music… I still love to play music, to write music. I have to live with this new kind of changes, but I don’t have to like it – and I don’t like it.” It’s a candid confession from a man who’s dedicated his life to his art: he’ll tolerate the realities of the digital age, but he sure as hell doesn’t have to be happy about them.
When it comes to Artificial Intelligence, Sinner’s skepticism turns into outright defiance. The recent surge of AI tools, from machine-generated album art to algorithms capable of composing passable music, is a hot topic in creative circles. Many artists have expressed concern or curiosity, but Mat’s take is far more scathing. In his view, “it’s a help for shitty musicians who can’t write their own song in a great way”. Why would any real artist even bother with AI? “Why should a creative, great musician use AI?” Sinner challenges. “For what reason? It’s our passion. It’s our job, it’s our life. And why should we use AI if we can come up with our own ideas…?” To him, relying on artificial intelligence to make music is anathema – it cheapens the whole point of being a musician. Writing and riffing and struggling to express yourself is the soul of the art; having a computer do it is, in Sinner’s words, “ruining the creativity of people”. He worries that younger or lazier artists will take shortcuts – “they think, oh, this is going fast, I use it, blah, blah, blah” – and end up losing the skills and authenticity that define great music. “In the end you still hear the difference,” Mat insists. “I hear the difference at least.” Despite rapid improvements in AI tech, he’s convinced that human-crafted music retains an organic magic that algorithms can’t truly replicate (at least not yet). And if someday that line blurs? Well, that scenario disturbs him deeply.
Ristić imagines a not-so-distant future where an “AI Spotify” could let anyone conjure new songs on demand – “you just type in ‘I like Helloween, Primal Fear, Avenged Sevenfold – make me an infinite playlist’” and out comes an endless stream of AI-fabricated tracks tailored to your taste. It’s a hypothetical technology that doesn’t quite exist yet, but “it’s not far off to see it.” Would that kind of AI-generated music buffet catch on? Sinner hopes not, especially in his corner of the music world. “I think the fans are still mostly loyal,” he says of metal audiences; rock and metal, with their emphasis on band identity and musicianship, might be more “protected” from AI trend-hopping than hyper-pop or electronica. But he’s not going to sugarcoat the uncertainty. “I don’t know where it will end or where we will go with this,” Mat admits. “The future will tell it, but it would be absolutely awful if [an AI-generated music takeover] happens.”
At 61 years old, Mat Sinner has earned the right to his old-school philosophy. He’s a survivor – of music industry upheavals, of band breakups, of life-threatening illness. Through it all, one thing has never changed: his love of music, the pure human thrill of creating and performing heavy metal. After cheating death and clawing his way back to the stage, Sinner isn’t about to let modern trends or technologies dampen his spirit. Primal Fear is gearing up to release a new album (Domination, due in September 2025 via Reigning Phoenix), and with a rejuvenated lineup by his side, Mat is as creatively fired-up as ever. The road here was anything but easy, but he’s living proof that perseverance can triumph over adversity.
