Atreyu have weathered three decades of shifting industry trends, and according to vocalist Brandon Saller, the secret to their long-lasting career is simply refusing to chase them.
During a recent conversation with Kevin Harris and Lisa Wills on “The Sound“, the singer opened up about the unique challenges of operating in today’s fast-paced digital landscape. Asked to identify the most bizarre change in the music business since the band first formed, he pointed directly to the modern pressure of constant content creation and fleeting genre fads.
“Just with the content era of everything right now, and we’ve gone through so many sort of cool genres and whatever, whatever kind of flavor of the week that has existed since we started. And that’s been a really strange thing to navigate ’cause you have the thought of, like, do we try and do what the thing is that’s popping right now, or do we just keep doing Atreyu and kind of keep our heads down? And I’m thankful we’ve always chose the latter. We’ve always just sort of kept our heads down and tried to just do the Atreyu thing, for better or worse,” he said (as transcribed by Blabbermouth).
Despite reaching their early 40s and logging countless miles on the road, the band members are still experiencing career firsts. Brandon Saller expressed immense gratitude for the group’s continued upward trajectory and the fact that they are still setting fresh goals.
“But it’s amazing. I don’t think any of us, when we were 16-, 17-year-old kids and started touring thought that we’d be still ripping,” Saller continued. “And not even still doing it, but I think we’re doing it at a level that’s really, really substantial and gratifying to us, but there’s still so much we haven’t done. There’s still so much growth to accomplish that it’s a cool thing to be a band in your early 40s and have hunger still and have things to be excited about and goals to set still.”
He highlighted a recent festival appearance that finally allowed them to bring a completely new element to their live production:
“We just did our first show, a couple of shows, a few months back on festivals. It was our first time ever doing pyro live, and for us, we were like kids in a candy store, man. We were trying our hardest not to giggle and look cool while the fire’s going off. ‘
“But there’s still so much to accomplish, and we’re still checking things off the list, and I think that in itself is a beautiful thing,” Saller added.
Reflecting on his long journey in the music business, the frontman also shared the advice he would offer his teenage self from the late 1990s. He admitted that early on, he placed far too much importance on outside opinions rather than trusting his bandmates’ creative instincts.
He said: “I think that I definitely cared a lot more in the beginning. I definitely looked around more than I should have, in the sense of, like, I was worried when I was younger about how I looked, what was cool, paying more attention to feedback than I should have. And I think we all got to a place with the band internally where we kind of found a trust within each other where it was, like, ‘No, no. If we think it’s a good idea, it’s a good idea.’
“Once you get over the concept, I think a younger approach, you can very easily get into the thinking of a band as commerce,” Saller concluded. “And I think that art as commerce is obviously a necessary thing, but if you think about it as commerce while you’re creating it, it can get really weird and really convoluted. And my younger self, I think, definitely had that backwards a little bit. I’m glad that I didn’t last that long in that frame of mind. But I think I would just tell myself to keep going. There’s never been a time in my life where I thought, ‘Don’t do this anymore.’ We’ve had incredible highs and incredible lows, and never once was it, like, ‘Okay, well, it’s over then.’ Even when Atreyu went on — we kind of took a hiatus for a few years some time ago, but even then it was, like, I had already started another band. I was back on tour in a couple months. Doing this is just what I do. So, I would be proud of my young self for still being here.”
Atreyu released their tenth studio album, The End Is Not The End, this past April through Spinefarm. Produced by Matt Pauling, the record sees the band leaning heavily into their aggressive roots, with Brandon Saller previously describing the release as “the heaviest and most metal record we’ve made.”
The new LP follows their highly successful 2023 release, The Beautiful Dark Of Life, which debuted in the Top 10 on Billboard‘s Top Hard Rock Albums chart. That record generated over 75 million streams on the strength of hit rock radio singles like “Gone” and “Watch Me Burn“, proving the group’s enduring relevance in the heavy music landscape.
