Songfacts®:

• "The End," the title track to the third Mammoth album, is a four-and-a-half-minute reminder that life is full of adversity, but also finger-tapped guitar riffs. Wolfgang Van Halen looks the fire in the face and stands tall amid the surrounding noise.
  
  He wrote the song during the 2025 California wildfires, which threatened his home and his recording studio (5150 Studios). "We were very lucky to be OK - a lot of people weren't - so it was a very scary time," he said on the Songfacts Podcast. "Throughout that lyric-writing process, this sort of doom-and-gloom anxiety was persisting throughout everything, and I realized that the concept of 'the end' - and what it could mean - seemed to be a through line. It was almost like a concept record without fully going for it. I realized that every song was closely related in unpacking what that could mean. That's usually from a negative place, but the very last song is a positive exploration of what 'the end' could be all in good time."
• The song opens with Wolfgang Van Halen's furious, finger tapped guitar riff that pays homage to his late father Eddie Van Halen's style. "I've had the tapping idea on the intro for 'The End' since before Mammoth," he said. "I was able to fit it into this world. It's still over-the-top and shreddy, but it's also melodic and controlled."
• Van Halen created and performed the song with his returning collaborator, Michael "Elvis" Baskette (Trivium, Alter Bridge, Slash). The pair's long-standing creative partnership stretches back to the mid-2010s when Wolfgang played bass on Tremonti's early albums, which Baskette produced.
• Wolfgang Van Halen teamed up with legendary director Robert Rodriguez to do a modern-day interpretation of Rodriguez's 1996 hit film From Dusk Till Dawn for the video. It tells the story of a rock band that is booked to play a show at a dive bar full of supernatural creatures.
• The video is packed with celebrity cameos:
  
  From Dusk till Dawn's Danny Trejo plays the ominous club owner who warns the band not to play too loudly.
  
  Slash (Guns N' Roses) and Myles Kennedy (Alter Bridge) appear as club patrons, with Kennedy eventually joining the ranks of the supernatural.
  
  Valerie Bertinelli (Wolfgang's mother) features in a heroic cameo, fighting off monsters in the crowd.
  
  And because no monster bash would be complete without expert gore, horror effects maestro Greg Nicotero was enlisted to conjure up a merry assortment of zombies, werewolves, and things with too many teeth.
  
  There are nods to Michael Jackson's "Thriller" throughout the video, including a parody of its spooky legal disclaimer.
• "The End" climbed to the top of the Billboard Mainstream Rock Airplay chart dated August 2, 2025. It was Mammoth's third #1 on the tally, following "Distance" and "Don't Back Down."