Grammy-nominated Lancaster five-piece August Burns Red has amassed monumental acclaim and generated endless momentum in their 20 years as a band. This year, the metalcore titans are celebrating that milestone with more releases and tour dates than ever before.
Year 20 started with a transition from Fearless Records to Sharptone Records for ABR, and while the move piqued the interest of die-hard fans everywhere, it was no surprise that the band’s first release with their new label, Death Below, blew open the gates as a darker response to their 2020 release, Guardians.
The years between the albums coincide with the height of the pandemic, packed with new experience and growth for every band, it seems. So it’s no surprise that ABR’s songwriting has flourished and grown, reflecting changes in perspective, the reality of living through such trauma — for better or worse — and the complexities of choosing hope.
We spoke with guitarist JB Brubaker about the band’s 10th studio album, the writing process, their recent tours, what it’s like coming back from COVID as a band, and the collaborations they were able to include in their latest release.
Well, this is kind of a full circle moment for me right now because the first time I ever saw you guys play was when you came to play at a little church in Puerto Rico. This must have been around 2006.
Oh, are you serious?
Yes.
Oh yeah, well if it was 2006 — our first and only time as a band to Puerto Rico. That’s so cool, dude. That was an amazing experience for us.
Yeah, it was a really cool show. I mean, growing up there, we didn’t really have a lot of bands come down. So to see someone like you guys come down, it was really really cool.
Yeah.
There was never a “blow-up” moment for ABR, but I think that is one of the reasons we’ve been able to retain a lot of our fans and a lot of people stuck with us. There has just been this slow gathering of people who care about the band and latch onto what we’re doing. We’re really grateful for that… for the dedication.
And it doesn’t seem like you guys have stopped since. I mean, albums, tours, anniversary tours, re-recording albums, a new record coming out March 24, and a 20-year anniversary tour. That’s a lot.
It is a lot. Yeah, I mean it’s twenty years… Spread it across twenty years it feels a little more manageable, I suppose. But if you throw it all together into a ball, it does feel like an awful lot that we’ve done in twenty years.
So, my question is… are you okay? You good?
I’m good right now, man. Yeah, I’m good. There have been ups and downs along the way. It’s not been bliss for twenty straight years. We’ve had our fair share of difficulties, but it’s been more good than bad otherwise we wouldn’t still be doing it. And it’s been a really slow but steady rise.
Even to this day. I mean, we are going into this 20th anniversary tour and it’s been the best attendance we’ve ever had on a headlining tour in the twenty years of our career. There was never a “blow-up” moment for ABR, but I think that is one of the reasons we’ve been able to retain a lot of our fans and a lot of people stuck with us. There has just been this slow gathering of people who care about the band and latch onto what we’re doing. We’re really grateful for that… for the dedication.
Absolutely. For your 20-year anniversary tour, it probably helps that you’ve got a really stacked bill.
It is a good bill. I will agree with that. We talk about that often on this tour, like, Devil Wears Prada, they’re our boys, they’re killing it themselves. The new album is so good. And Bleed from Within — super pro band — have never been to America for some reason, and we’re fortunate enough that they’ve chosen our tour to be their coming out party here in North America. So, the stars kind of aligned for us with the bill. We’re really happy with who we’ve got out here.
That’s awesome man. So, you’ve got a new record out, Death Below.
That’s right.
I listened to the record several times today, I read the press release, and I thought I had the record figured out within the first two songs… I was like “Okay, there’s an arc here. They’re starting really dark. We’re gonna come out on the other side.” I didn’t feel that.
As soon as we got to the last song, it feels like we ended where we began, and reading the press release, you guys started writing this during COVID… Was this an intentional choice? Were you like, “This record is gonna be dark, it’s gonna be grittier…”
Oh, no. It wasn’t intentional. This is how the songs came out. This is a dark time. The first six songs that you hear on the album are the first six songs we wrote. I wrote the first three, Dustin wrote the next three, and we were working on… The original plan was to write this pretty dark, metal EP that we were going to self-release because we were between labels and we had ideas for songs and we’re like, “Yeah, you know, we can do this one-off EP that’s like this pretty dark, metal album.”
It’s a little different from what we’ve done historically, but we got to a point where we were like, “Let’s make this into a full-length, we’ve got a lot of good material here, we have more ideas…” We had just released Guardians, so no one was like, “Hey where’s your next record?” We had some time.
So, we wanted to flesh it out and do a full-length. And I agree, it is the darkest album ABR has ever made. It sounds the darkest and the lyrics are the darkest. But it came from a really dark time. Personally for us, and interpersonally as a band, we went through a lot of stuff together during the pandemic and this is what came out.
Yeah man, and it’s not just lyrically. I mean, with “The Cleansing,” it opens with… it’s a black metal song essentially.
That’s the first song I wrote for the record too. I really like that sound, it’s something that we haven’t gotten to do much- or any of, I guess with ABR, it’s one of the sub-genres of metal that we haven’t explored much. But I’m a big fan of that sound and it felt like the right time to… I mean, I was writing for myself when I wrote that song.
Well, it was a very nice surprise. It caught me off guard, that’s for sure.
That’s awesome, I’m glad you feel that way.
When the vocals came in, it was shocking in the best way possible.
Good, I’m glad to hear that. That’s my favorite song on the record… Well, the intro track into “The Cleansing,” I wrote that as one song and kind of chopped off the intro to make it into a separate track just because I felt like ten minutes is kind of asking a lot for an album opener.
Yeah.
Especially for a band like us that doesn’t have ten-minute songs.
Not every song has to do with the same thing, but it kind of tells a story, for better or for worse, of what was going on during that time.
But here’s the thing… You have two songs on this record that are pushing eight minutes in length. None of them feel like eight minutes in length. It doesn’t feel like I’m listening to a Dream Theater song.
Well, that’s a good thing.
It flows.
Good, I feel that way, too. There are songs where, when I was writing them, I wasn’t looking at the clock thinking, “How long is this song coming in at?” It was just kind of where the songs took me. This is where they went. They kind of steered themselves. And then I looked at the run time and was like, “Woah, okay. This is a really long song.” “The Reckoning” is a really long song.
“Dark Divide,” that was another one. We cut off the intro and made it into 2 tracks because we were like, “Do we really want another seven or eight-minute song on this record? We need to kind of ease up here.” And streaming is weird too. With the way streaming is now, it kind of encourages artists to produce more tracks that are shorter than fewer tracks that are longer. It’s just the way royalties are paid and stuff.
Yeah, and people’s attention spans… But it doesn’t feel like seven minutes, which was my favorite thing. It just flowed and moved. The entire record almost feels like it’s a movie. There’s almost a story flowing through it, and I guess that story is 2020 through 2021.
Yeah, and not every song has to do with the same thing, but it kind of tells a story, for better or for worse, of what was going on during that time.
And I’m glad you feel that flow because we wanted this album to feel, for the most part, like one song flowed into the next. That was the original goal when we were working on the EP version of it. And I think toward the back end of the album, we kind of lost that perfect, seamless transition on a couple tracks, but for the most part, the songs transition song to song pretty nicely. I originally wanted to do a full-blown concept. Every song flows… There’s a theme throughout the whole album, like one coherent piece, but we couldn’t get on the same page as a band on what the concept should be and how to tackle that.
Man, that sucks.
Compromises must be made sometimes.
I mean, there’s always the next record, right?
Yeah, we’ll see. Just got to get them all on the same page. You know, five guys, five opinions is kind of tricky.
So, if you had made a concept, what would the concept have been?
Well, I would have gone with the story of what “Premonition” and “The Cleansing” was, it just would have been a lot longer, which is basically the telling of this evil that kind of takes over the world and eventually gets conquered. You could break it down as simply as the story of the pandemic and beating it, but some of the guys weren’t into that because it would be a very time capsule-y kind of story and maybe it’s a really common one. I don’t know, that’s probably something a lot of people were writing about during the pandemic.
But my bandmates were kind enough to let me write the lyrics for those first two tracks and I had written something during the pandemic for that song, and I had no intention of using it — I was really not thinking it would be accepted. But I sent the lyrics over. We were in the studio and Jake was into them and the other guys were down, so I got to go with it, which I was happy about.
On writing Guardians, I had made a conscious effort for the songs I had contributed to that record: to try to write more simply and more concisely and to see if it would reach a different audience.
That’s awesome. It’s interesting that you brought up your band not really wanting to do the concept because it would be like a time capsule record, because when I was listening to this and I saw that you guys had started writing during 2020, during lockdown… I was like “Oh, it’s their COVID record.” Every band had a COVID record, right? But this one doesn’t necessarily feel like a COVID record to me.
Personally, when I was listening to it, knowing that you guys wrote it during that time, it felt like it captured the feeling of those two years more accurately than any other COVID record that I had heard. It’s not directly referencing sickness, it’s just dark. There’s a lot of internal and external anger and disappointment coursing through the whole record, which I think all of us were feeling during that time.
Yeah, maybe it’s just a mood… The mood fits the time in which it was written.
One hundred percent. So going back to these seven-minute songs… On your press release, it said that you guys think this is your most progressive record yet. So, while you were writing, you mentioned you were between labels, you didn’t have anyone telling you what to do. Did you just throw the rule book out and just all of you guys sit down and say, “We’re going to do whatever we want?”
Well, I think that has been our approach generally speaking for our careers as a whole; however, I’ll speak just for myself, on writing Guardians, I had made a conscious effort for the songs I had contributed to that record: to try to write more simply and more concisely and to see if it would reach a different audience… a more mass metal audience than what we had been doing. And putting myself into that box left me feeling unsatisfied artistically with a lot of the songs that I wrote. I like them enough, but I didn’t feel fulfilled, and I promised myself when I went to write the next album, which turned into Death Below, that I was not going to do that. I was going to let the music flow out of me like I had for our entire career up until Guardians.
For that reason, I personally feel very satisfied with Death Below and what I contributed to it and the songs. I really love this album and I’m really proud of it and I felt that way on a lot of records in the past because I did what felt right. That’s the big difference here between Guardians and Death Below for me personally.
At the time, did putting yourself into that box song-writing-wise, did that feel right when you were making Guardians?
No, it never felt right. It felt like I was trying hard to access ears we hadn’t accessed before. I wanted to reach new fans and we had done some touring with some bands. We were out with Parkway Drive, who really simplified their sound and exploded as a result and are this metal powerhouse, writing really accessible metal music now. I watched their show when we were on the road with them, they kill it live and their songs sound huge live, and I was like, “Maybe I need to reel it back a bit…using fast riffs and pretty linear song structures and stuff are kind of hard to get if you are just hearing us for the first time live.”
So I wrote songs like “Defender” and “Bones” and whatever else that I contributed to on Guardians and they’re fine, they’re cool, I guess… But, I don’t love those songs the way I love other songs we’ve done that I really got to pour myself into and not worry about how it was going to be received.
Because those songs are authentically you.
Correct, yep. There’s authenticity on some of the stuff that I wrote on Guardians that just didn’t feel as good.
You know, with all the stuff you guys have done recently, Leveler re-recorded album, one of my favorite things on that was the guest features. You had Misha, Matt Heafy, Ryan Kirby… And we’d seen you do features before with people like Jeremy Mckinnon, but this record is packed with features and I’m honestly surprised that the Jason Richardson feature hasn’t happened sooner.
Yeah, I love that feature. That was one of the last ones to come together.
Was it?
Yeah, we were still working on the song “Tightrope,” that’s a Dustin track, and he had this section that he had reworked. We had demoed the song out and we had sat on it for a while and he reworked this one section that turned into a solo before it was this rising tremolo guitar section that didn’t have a full-blown solo in it. And he’s like, “You know what? I think I want to put a guitar solo here,” and he rewrote the feel of it a bit and had been tinkering around with a guitar solo, but he wasn’t fond of what he was coming up with.
I said, “Dude lets get a feature here.” We had just done the Misha thing and kind of opened up the gates for thinking about guitar players who might want to play, and I was like, “I’ll hit up Jason and see if he wants to do something,” and he said yes and had a solo over to us like two days later. He was out on the road with All That Remains and just busted one out backstage and sent it over and we were immediately like “Yes, this is sick. He killed it.” He is an insane guitar player. That part sounds like it’s clearly not a member of August Burns Red playing. It sounds nothing like anything on any of the records because it’s so over the top and I love that about it.
I was going to bring that up. Vocal features are so prominent you can instantly tell, “Oh there’s another vocalist on this track.” But with someone like Jason on guitar, since you guys already have a very signature sound with your guitar playing and then throwing him into the mix, it was also shocking in the perfect way and it fit so well.
I’m so glad you feel that way. I’m quite fond of that part as well. It takes that song over the top for me. That’s the standout section in that track for me.
What was your process in finding people to feature on songs? Did you write the songs with features in mind or did it just come about naturally? You’ve got Jesse Leach from Killswitch, Jason, JT from Erra, and Spencer Chamberlain on “Reckoning.”
Well, we didn’t write the songs with anyone in particular in mind. We kind of put feelers out to various artists to see if they were available, interested, whatever. We were fortunate enough to get Jesse and Spencer. They were both pumped to be a part of it. Jesse traveled down from New York, where he lives, and came into the studio and workshopped with the guys for a day, with Jake and our producer, Grant, and was just really professional and great about it.
Spencer did something similar. He didn’t come into the studio, but he went into a studio in his area and tried all kinds of different parts and sent us lots of ideas and worked hard and workshopped and said, you know, “Whatever you guys got to do with this stuff, you can make this part longer, or go here, or rearrange…” He was really open and down for whatever. He wanted to be really collaborative about it and was really professional and easy to work with. Both him and Jesse were. So great experiences all around with those guys.
JT from Erra, he’s our boy, one of our best buds from touring together. He came into the studio — he doesn’t live too far away from us — and that song was written vocally and Dustin kind of went through it and picked out some sections that he thought would be cool for JT to do and put in place holder vocals that he screamed himself. Then, JT came into the studio one day and knocked them out. That was more like we had a blueprint for him, whereas Jesse and Spencer and a little more creative freedom, I think, with their sections.
We’ve always wanted to be really uplifting and hopeful, and I still want to be that as a band…but this was not a positive time for many people.
I love the way “Reckoning” ends. I was listening to the record, and I had it on repeat and the ending of Reckoning flows perfectly right back into Premonition and The Cleansing… It’s almost like picking up where we left off.
I totally agree, I love that too. There are some albums that I can think of that have done that and I have always felt that that is really cool how it almost goes round and round.
It feels like a snapshot from those two years, but not in a, “Oh, this is our pandemic record” kind of way. It’s just a snapshot from a troubled time and I think that’s something new for you guys… For a full record to be like this snapshot of a shared human experience that we all had.
Yeah, and it was a bleak one, and that’s not something that we really dove too much into without having the happy ending at the end. We’ve always wanted to be really uplifting and hopeful, and I still do as a whole want to be that as a band, I don’t want to be… I want to be positive overall, but this was not a positive time for many people.
That’s not how life is though. You can’t just be happy and positive all the time. Those few years were terrible.
Yeah, they really were.
There are uplifting moments on this record, at least I thought so with “The Cleansing.” It starts pissed, black metal, blast beats, but then it has the uplifting moment toward the middle and end of the song.
This is something that I don’t know if the listener will pick up on from just listening, but you’re talking about how there’s a shift made in “The Cleansing,” and there is. In the second half of the song, or the last minute and a half or so, when you come out of the clean section, it goes into the same guitar parts that are from the beginning of the song, except they’re now in a major key. They’re no longer minor. There’s the same lead, the same rhythm progression, and it just resolves the song from a place of misery to a place of conquering that misery.
I was going to bring that up, because I wanted to know if you guys were in the studio writing and were like, “Oh, this will fit right here” and then realized it was the rift from the beginning or if it was fully intentional to come full circle.
No, it was fully intentional. I actually wrote the ending first. I wrote that guitar lead that the song ends on, that was the first part of the song that I wrote. And then I moved it to a minor key and built the rest of the song backward in that way, but I wanted to end it with that uplifting resolve.
I think that is the key to making a seven to eight-minute song not sound like seven to eight minutes of blast beats.
Yeah, that certainly helps, doesn’t it?
It does help. We’ve talked about this record being a bit more bleak for you guys, but I feel like it ends like you’re still searching for hope. The world has opened back up, touring is a possibility. You guys are killing it on tour right now. Do you think that we’ve reached a point of hope? If you were to do a part two for this record, do you think we’ve reached that point of hope or are we still searching for it?
I feel pretty positive about where things are at now to where things were at in April of 2020 when I started writing “The Cleansing.” I’m definitely in a much better headspace. I’ve learned so much during that time about myself and my emotions. It was kind of like the silver lining of the pandemic. It was a hard time, but it made me grow up in a lot of ways.
It taught me how to be a way better dad. I was this in-and-out dad who was on the road so much. It really helped me to learn what it is to be a good father because that was something I was able to skirt around. Not intentionally, but it was just the way my life was set up. Home for a month, now I’m away for a month — this never-ending cycle — and then suddenly, I’m home for eighteen months and my wife and son and I had to learn how to cohabitate in that way because we’d never done that before, and I had a small child who I am now so much more bonded to. He is the light of my life because of what I learned, and the time spent together. That’s a really great positive of what came from the pandemic years.
That is something that my wife and I talk about a lot. Those years were rough, we lost family members. But at the same time, the world shut down, and all of a sudden, my wife and I are in the same room for twenty-four hours a day, really getting to know each other. And not just me and her, but also getting to know ourselves as well.
We can’t go to work, which is what we do every day, because there is no work now. What do I like doing? Who am I? Those years were terrible, but I do think there were positives that came from those years, and one of those is being appreciative of being around other people and being appreciative of seeing live music again. There for a second, I was scared. I thought, “Am I ever going to be able to see a show again?”
Right, and live streams just aren’t the same. I watched a bunch of live streams, ABR put on a bunch of live streams and I’ll take it for what it was during that time, but it’s not the same watching a show on the couch in your living room. It’s just now the same.
I agree, although your Christmas Burns Red Christmas special was pretty great.
Thank you. I’m proud of what we did, I liked those shows too and they were great for the time, but I’m glad that we don’t have to put those kinds of things together and we can play proper live shows now.
Absolutely. I think this is a good place to end it. Is there anything else you’d like to share? What else do you guys have coming up?
We’re actually taking the summer off which is pretty cool because we never do that, except during the pandemic when we had to.
Good for you guys.
Yeah, it will be nice to just be at home and enjoy the summer with our loved ones. Then we’ll have a bunch of touring going on again in the fall. We have an album to support, and we’re pumped to get out there and play some new songs.
Well, I think fans are going to enjoy hearing this new stuff because it’s got everything that I love about August Burns Red. It is heavy, it’s got breakdowns, it’s got singalong parts, it’s emotional, and it’s vulnerable. I think this record is a triumph.
That’s awesome. It’s really nice talking to someone who has heard the album too because we’ve done a lot of press and not everyone has heard the record yet so it’s nice to be able to talk to someone who has actually heard it and can know what I’m talking about when I talk about certain things. Thanks so much for taking the time to check it out before the interview.
Thanks for taking the time to talk to me. It’s been awesome.
It’s been a pleasure. HM has always been big supporters, so we are thankful for you guys.
