ATREYU vocalist Brandon Saller has reflected on nearly three decades of watching the music industry reinvent itself — and on the band's decision to consistently ignore whatever was reinventing it.
Asked by Kevin Harris and Lisa Wills of The Sound to name the strangest change he has witnessed, Saller pointed at the content treadmill. "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," he said. "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."
The payoff, he argues, is that the band is still hungry rather than merely still active. "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 said. "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."
Proof of that arrived at a recent run of festival dates, where ATREYU used pyro live for the first time. "We were like kids in a candy store, man," he said. "We were trying our hardest not to giggle and look cool while the fire's going off."
Asked what he would tell the teenager who first climbed into a van in the late 1990s, Saller was candid about his own early insecurity. "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," he said. "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.'"
He also warned against the trap of treating a band as a business while the songs are still being written: "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."
ATREYU's tenth album, "The End Is Not The End," arrived in April via Spinefarm. Produced by Matt Pauling, it was described by Saller before release as "the heaviest and most metal record we've made." Their previous LP, 2023's "The Beautiful Dark Of Life," cracked the Top 10 of Billboard's Top Hard Rock Albums chart and drew more than 75 million streams.