BRANDON SALLER Explains Why ATREYU Didn't Listen To Any New Music While Working On 'The End Is Not The End' Album

In a new interview with LA Lloyd, the nationally syndicated radio host for the "LA Lloyd Rock 30", ATREYU vocalist Brandon Saller spoke about the band's long-awaited new studio album, "The End Is Not The End", which is set for release on April 24 via Spinefarm. Addressing the fact that the upcoming LP was recorded during a time when ATREYU was celebrating the 21st anniversary of the band's 2004 sophomore album "The Curse" by performing the gold-certified LP in its entirety on European and North American tours in 2025, as well as releasing a completely re-recorded version of "The Curse", Brandon said (as transcribed by BLABBERMOUTH.NET): "It was really cool, man. I think the beginning of 2025 was sort of us wrapping up some details of what would become the next album. And then it was a bunch of sort of looking backwards. The majority of the year was doing 'The Curse' [anniversary] tours and finishing recording the 'Curse 2.0' and releasing that. So it was very much a reflective year and just kind of looking backwards. But all the while we had this new album in our back pocket that we were excited and planning and plotting to release as well this year. So it was kind of a cool and sometimes difficult thing to kind of be living in the past and the future at the same time, all while trying to live in the present on tour. But it was awesome, man. It was a really cool year last year. The 'Curse' tour was such a fun time, such a great success for us, that it just got us really all the more excited to put out new music."

Saller also talked about ATREYU bassist Marc "Porter" McKnight's recent comment that he and his bandmates didn't listen to any music that was released in the last decade during the songwriting process for "The End Is Not The End". He said: "I think part of it, obviously, was to kind of dig into what got us going in our youth. 'Cause there's some magic there; that's what started the band in the first place. But I think another big part of it too, and I don't say this to slight any modern band because there are so many phenomenal, great bands that I'm fans of, but sort of in the climate of our genre specifically, in the hard rock genre and metal and hardcore, there seems to be sort of a shortage of just really fun original music. A lot of it is sort of just recreations of recreations of recreations at this point, and we didn't want to fall into that at all. In doing so, it was tough. I love a lot of new music and I listen to a lot of new music and a lot of my friends are newer artists. And so it was challenging to not listen to any of that stuff just so that we didn't kind of get an even accidental influence. And instead it was pulling influence, like you said earlier, from music that was at least a decade old. If we got influenced by a song or an artist, it's, like, cool. That thing didn't happen for at least a decade. And for us it was even further back. It was kind of looking back into IN FLAMES, SOILWORK, HATEBREED, older DEFTONES, just things that we grew up on. And even with the older kind of classic rock stuff that Dan [Jacobs, ATREYU guitarist] was really into, and the '80s stuff that Dan was really into. And it was cool just to kind of, even sonically, go after things that were more, in our eyes, timeless, 'cause a lot of these records that we listen to now, it's, like, they still hold up; they still to this day sound incredible and punch you in the face. And they're set apart from what the kind of modern mold of a record sounds like, and we really just tried to dive into that as hard as we could."

He added: "I think we realized part of the special sauce, if you will, of ATREYU always was the fact that you couldn't really put us anywhere specific. We sort of always carved our own path, made our own lane. And it's, like, were we metal? Were we hardcore? Were we a rock band? We would tour with TAKING BACK SUNDAY and THE USED, and then we'd go on tour with LAMB OF GOD and IRON MAIDEN. And so we've been all over the place where that sort of was, I think, our strong suit, was that you couldn't really put us in a box. And I think that this just led to that even more, trying to kind of flex that muscle and sort of reclaim the road that we started when we first started the band."

"The End Is Not The End" is undeniably ATREYU's heaviest album ever and their most adventurous.

"We realized what made ATREYU great in the beginning was that we didn't sound like anyone else," Brandon previously explained in a press release. "We didn't really make sense anywhere. We weren't an emo band, a metal band, a punk band — but somehow it all worked. We kind of just carved our own path."

Guitarists Dan Jacobs and Travis Miguel, bassist Porter McKnight, drummer Kyle Rosa, and Saller created several of "The End Is Not The End"'s songs on creative trips.

"Tokyo made us feel like kids again," Saller says. "We'd write for a few hours in the morning, then go out and get lost in all this inspiration. The first song we finished was 'Dead', and we knew we were on to something."

After the Japanese sessions, the band and their producer decamped to San Juan Island off the coast of Washington, where isolation became a creative accelerant. "It was the polar opposite of Tokyo," Saller explained. "We didn't leave the house for four days and wrote some of the heaviest songs on the record."

The result is an album that feels simultaneously classic and unfamiliar, aggressive and unselfconscious, deeply emotional and unconcerned with trends. Produced by Matt Pauling, ATREYU's tenth album is vibrant, inventive, and beautifully aggressive.

"It's our heaviest, most metal record we've made," Saller pointed out. "But it's also the biggest musical journey we've taken in years."

The album moves seamlessly from soaring melodic heft to muscular metallic weight, with cinematic shades and atmosphere, all tied together by a driving, raw intensity. Tracks like "Dead", "Ghost In Me", "Children Of Light" (featuring Max Cavalera) and "Afterglow" sound both timely and timeless.

"The End Is Not The End" track listing:

01. The End Is Not The End
02. Dead
03. Break Me
04. All For You
05. Ghost In Me
06. Glass Eater
07. Wait My Love, I'll Be Home Soon
08. Ego Death
09. Death Rattle
10. Children Of Light
11. In The Dark
12. Afterglow
13. Break The Glass

ATREYU recently announced a spring tour supporting SEVENDUST, kicking off April 20 in Indianapolis, Indiana before concluding in Knoxville, Tennessee on May 20.

ATREYU's riffs, hooks, melodies, and relentless energy remain a driving force in heavy music, with over a billion streams worldwide and a fanbase that keeps growing. The Southern California band recently wrapped a triumphant co-headlining U.S. run and tore through massive festivals like Download, Hellfest, Welcome To Rockville and Inkcarceration.

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 latest album, "The Beautiful Dark Of Life" (2023, Spinefarm),debuted in the Top 10 on Billboard's Top Hard Rock Albums and has already 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".

ATREYU is:

Brandon Saller - Lead Vocals
Dan Jacobs - Guitar
Travis Miguel - Guitar
Porter McKnight - Bass/Vocals
Kyle Rosa - Drums

Photo credit: Sean Stiegeimeier