ATREYU's BRANDON SALLER: 'There's Still So Much Growth To Accomplish'

In a recent interview with Kevin Harris and Lisa Wills of The Sound, ATREYU vocalist Brandon Saller was asked to name "the most bizarre thing" that has changed the music industry in the three decades since the band's inception. He responded (as transcribed by BLABBERMOUTH.NET): "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 continued: "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. 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."

Brandon added: "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. '

He concluded: "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."

Asked what advice, if he could go back in time, he would give to that teenager who started touring with ATREYU in the late 1990s, Brandon 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," he explained. "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's latest studio album, "The End Is Not The End", came out in April via Spinefarm. Produced by Matt Pauling, the band's tenth LP was previously described by Saller as "the heaviest and most metal record we've made."

Since forming around the turn of the millennium, ATREYU has pushed well beyond its DIY roots — earning multiple RIAA gold records, Top 20 Billboard 200 debuts, and spots on major film and video-game soundtracks. Their previous album, "The Beautiful Dark Of Life" (2023, Spinefarm),debuted in the Top 10 on Billboard's Top Hard Rock Albums and racked up over 75 million streams, with singles like "Gone" and "Watch Me Burn" lighting up rock radio and flagship playlists like Spotify's "Volume" and Apple Music's "The Riff".