Atreyu - Interview - 2007

The hottest temperature ever recorded in the UK was 38 degrees. The average for July is 20 degrees. Today, here in the Hi Fi Buys Amphitheatre car park in Atlanta, on this, the 15th date of Korn’s Family Values tour, it is 43 degrees; only a few degrees shy of Georgia’s State record. Its neighbour State, South Carolina has even issued an official weather warning.

‘Hot’ isn’t the word. ‘Hot’ is stepping off the plane when you arrive in Tenerife. ‘Hot’ is sitting in the sun for four of the UK’s 10 annual hot hours. This is ridiculous. There are a lot of sights, sounds and smells going on around us, but it’s hard to concentrate as the searing, scorching and unrelenting heat is the only sensation we’re aware of.

But there is work to do. So we have a beer.

On a bill that includes Korn, Evanescence, Hellyeah and relative unknowns in the US, Trivium, are punkrockmetalcore wildcards, Atreyu, who we’re here to speak to today. With the headliners such as they are, this is hardly an Atreyu crowd; it’s made up almost exclusively of America’s answer to chavs. These southerners are more urbane than the rural hick stereotype purported by The Simpsons’ straw-chewing Cletus. There are no emo scene kids, no windmilling hardcore purists and no cute little scene girls with lip piercings; just massive dudes and dudettes with badly arranged teeth, non-ironic moustaches and tattoos that look like they were applied with a crayon by a seven year old.

The mosh pit looks like 18 ultimate fighting matches going on at once: extras from Prison Break clash with guys with make Phil Anselmo look like Phil Collins; and when someone goes down, no one helps them up. This is war. It’s not that the vibe is ominous, we just don’t want to spill anyone’s pint in here. Even the Gambian concierge at our hotel suggested we not travel without a gun. ‘Worried’ isn’t the word. Everyone is sweating like hostages on a hijacked plane; most people’s sweat-patches join in the middle.

If Atreyu’s tour bus doesn’t have air conditioning, we may not make it out alive. 

“Honestly?” says Atreyu frontman, Alex Varkatzas rhetorically when we ask what the band would have thought had we played them their new album, ‘Lead Sails, Paper Anchor’ to them back when the band formed in 1998.

“I probably wouldn’t have liked it,” he admits candidly. “I was 15 and only into stuff like Crass.”

“I think I would have liked,” admits self confessed 80s-ophile guitarist Dan Jacobs “I liked Subhumans, but then I also liked New Found glory. I liked punk, but everything else was a guilty pleasure.”

And Atreyu should know all about that; the group are frequently cited by punk, metal and hardcore fans as a guilty pleasure.

“Guilty pleasure bands usually write really great songs,” says drummer/singer Brandon Saller with a look that seeks affirmation. And gets it. “80s hair metal bands write really good songs. Pop artists too. Kelly Clarkson’s got some fuck’n tunes man!”

“As you get older,” adds Alex philosophically, “you don’t have ‘guilty pleasures’ anymore because you stop giving a fuck what people think.

And just as people’s tastes mature with age, so has the Californian quintet’s music. Gone is the melodic hardcore purism of their 2002 debut, ‘Suicide Notes And Butterfly Kisses’; gone are the metalcore structures and strictures of ‘The Curse’; and gone is the commercial hinterland vibe of last year’s ‘A Death Grip On Yesterday’. While each longplayer has showcased healthy growth from previous outings, ‘Lead Sails…’ displays a much bigger musical and stylistic leap forward than the band have taken before. ‘Brave’ is not the word.

This is arguably Atreyu’s own guilty pleasures album: packed with 80s influences from Slayer-esque riffing and Skid Row sleaze to stadium rock melody and even ballads.

“We’ve always tried to better ourselves with every new record,” says Dan, looking over our shoulder at the tour bus’ TV, currently showing some disturbing voodoo ritual, before Alex chimes in: “We try to play it progressively less safe with each record.”

But why the leap? Why so big? Why now?

“In the past when we’d gone to write a song,” explains Brandon. “We might have said ‘I dunno if we can use this’. But now we’re like: ‘Let’s do it!’ There was no question of ‘Can we or can’t we?’, ‘Should we or Shouldn’t we?’.”

“Even on the last record,” says Dan. “There were a lot of things that we were afraid to try because we didn’t know what people would think.”

“Or if it was the right time,” adds Brandon, also watching the screen. “Certain things we hadn’t tried before felt right this time so we did them.”

Nearly all of the biggest bands in rock and metal have been accused of selling out at some time or other, but Atreyu have endured these slings and arrows almost from the get go. And doubtless with some of their most accessible material yet, these young men will suffer the same tired accusations. But one man’s ‘selling out’ is another man’s ‘ambition’. 

“When you’re young you want bands to belong to you,” says Alex in an assertive tone. “Then they get bigger and you hate them for it. But when you get older you care less about what’s hip or underground. You just like what you like.”

“The reality of it is,” says Brandon, wincing at the sight of a man killing a goat and eating its raw testicle. “Any band that says ‘We don’t want to be big’ is fucking lying. Why would you not want to play to 5,000 people instead of 50? Why would you not want to sell some records? That’s the dream of being in a band.”

“People should chill the fuck out,” adds Alex almost angrily as he too grosses out at scenes of convulsing children, their eyes rolling back in their heads. “If you like our new record, boom, high five. If not? Fine, still high five. Y’know why? Because I’ve gotta go eat a sandwich, take a shit, and my life goes on…”

Speaking of critics, Atreyu have always been a contentious choice. Whether or not you think they are one of many misappropriated labels – emo, screamo, pop punk or metalcore – their gradual but impressive rise pisses on (and pisses off) the nay-sayers from a great height.

“We’re one of the few bands that never accepted the metalcore tag in our music,” says Brandon frankly, before Alex takes over.

“All those terms were being made up by critics for bands like us. Boy Sets Fire, Poison The Well and so on. Then Killswitch Engage blew the doors of it and it got huge.”

As the band will agree, metalcore has become a glut of identikit bands all working from the scream-sing-breakdown-repeat formula. But as a few pioneers progress, the rest drown or dry-up.

We are reminded of Atreyu’s Orange County buddies in the now defunct Eighteen Visions. The metalcore stalwarts made a stylistic leap of faith and found themselves between a rock and place not hard enough: recording a pop rock record with its sights on the charts, but failing to re-connect with a now disenfranchised hardcore fanbase.

Are Atreyu worried that this album may alienate many fans? Will there be leaden sales?

“If you’re going to worry about it you shouldn’t do it,” states Brandon boldly. “We just take it day by day.”

“That said,” says Alex pensively. “We worry a little bit I guess.”

This should be come as surprise. When you’re 18 you’re young, and giving two years of your life to a band is no great sacrifice. But with each year that passes, it will become harder and harder to get into a good career or complete educations. Many musicians find themselves jobless and penniless at 34 having given their adolescence and early adulthood to music; left only with skills that would qualify them for employment in fast food outlets, meat factories or… other bands.

“You could easily say ‘oh cry me a river about your poor life you fucking rock star faggot’” Says Alex with a hint of vitriol dripping from his lips. “But at the end of the day there’ll be good and bad in anything that you do.”

And while the three interviewees are non-specific about their individual sacrifices – almost to the point of evasion – these 24 and 25 year olds acknowledge that with each passing album, there is more riding on each new album. But they’re confident they have what it takes to persevere and to survive.

He pauses, and before turning off the jilting images of shamanic trances and bestial brutality. He fixes us with a look.

“When it comes down to it, shit or get off the pot y’know… we do shit. Whether it’s good or bad, we did it.”

It’s not Baudelaire, but it makes sense.

Suddenly the power on the Atreyu tour bus dies. The lights blink out, the air conditioning flutters off and the vehicle’s generator whirrs to a stop like the Starship Enterprise powering down. The fake-cool of the bus turns quickly to a clammy warm, before yielding to the elements and becoming a carpet-lined sauna. The interview comes to the boil.

 “If you only like ‘Suicide Notes…’ and music like that,” says Brandon, “then I could understand why you wouldn’t like our new record.”

What he doesn’t say is: ‘if you like top notch metallic hard rock with huge hooks, intense solos and sing-along choruses, it would be hard to understand why you wouldn’t like it’.

“If you like it cool, if you don’t then I’m sorry,” says Alex as if to a hypothetical ex-fan. “Actually no I’m not sorry, but whatever… maybe you’ll like our next one.”

“We could have easily gone and said, ‘Right’,” says Brandon steering Alex’s rising venom. “’Let’s write ‘The Curse’ again and just keep those fans that like that’, but where’s the fun in that?”

As Dan rightly states: so many bands simply farm out identical records again and again until people lose interest.

The Family Values crowd are amongst the first people to hear the new material live. And if today’s sweat-drenched performance and the perspiring crowd are anything to go by, Atreyu shouldn’t be worried in the slightest.

“People seem really into the new stuff,” says Brandon. “And the critics are going to be… well, critics.”

An hour later Atreyu (completed by guitarist Marc McKnight and bassist Travis Miguel) are leaping and throwing shapes as if evading some invisible branding iron: perspiration sprays from each sweltering member like a dog shaking off pond water; no less animated for the debilitating heat.

You may think that any band less ‘hetero’ than Pantera would invite murders in Georgia. But these metal heads don’t care about skinny jeans, eyeliner or straightedge tattoos: they just want to rock the fuck out. And Atreyu is perfect soundtrack.

Almost no one has heard new track, ‘Blow’ [which features Josh Todd on the album] but when the chorus comes round a second time everyone knows what to do and the horns go up, fists pump the air and circle pits begin to throw dust into the muggy sky.

Fuck what the cool kids say: listen with your heart, not your head. Whether on record or on stage, Atreyu are hot property. In fact, ‘hot’ isn’t even the word.

Synths n' sellouts

IRON MAIDEN ‘SEVENTH SON OF A SEVENTH SON’

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Criticized at the time for using synths in an effort to find some mainstream appeal, the album went to number one in the charts and remains a firm fan favourite.

DEF LEPPARD ‘HYSTERIA’

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Lep’ were hardly underground before, but this massive album made them US stadium favourites and gave them a massive seven singles that charted on the US Hot 100. 18 million copies sold worldwide.

PAPA ROACH ‘GETTING AWAY WITH MURDER’

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With a new lighter production sound, Papa Roach alienated much of their fanbase, selling only a third as many copies as their previous offering, ‘lovehatetragedy’.

LOSTPROPHETS ‘LIBERATION TRANSMISSION’

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After ‘Start Something’ was a surprise hit in the US, the ‘Prophets went all out wit this one, and while it didn’t get the US love they’d hoped, it went to number one in the UK.

JUDAS PRIEST ‘TURBO’

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Keen to get in on the ‘hair metal’ action, Priest released this pop metal album replete with synthesizers. Hailed by many as their worst album, it still went platinum at the time.  

EIGHTEEN VISIONS ‘EIGHTEEN VISIONS’

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Already on the slide, Eighteen Visions tried to hit the charts with this desperate attempt. Neither the label, the critics nor the fans were behind it. It bombed and the group disbanded.

ZZ TOP ‘ELIMINATOR’

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With its deliberately poppy electronic drums and synths, who’d have thought that this driving rock record would go on to sell 10 million copies and become a lauded classic.