BRANDON SALLER Reflects On ATREYU's Three-Year Hiatus: 'I Didn't Know If We Would Come Back'

At this weekend's Aftershock festival in Sacramento, California, ATREYU's Brandon Saller spoke to Baby Huey and Chasta of the San Francisco radio station 107.7 The Bone about bout the band's self-imposed three-year hiatus which lasted from 2011 until 2014. Asked if he believed it was really a "hiatus" at the time and whether there were "fears that it might not come back around", Brandon said (as transcribed by BLABBERMOUTH.NET): "I think we all had different perspectives on that. If I'm being honest, I didn't think it was. I didn't know if we would come back. The last show we played, I got off stage, fricking bawled my eyes out and my wife scurried me into my car and I left. 'Cause at that time I was, like, 'This is it.'"

He continued: "I think the reason why it's a good thing for bands to do that if they need to is, we're lucky enough to do this for a living, and you're lucky enough to have people spend their hard-earned money to like come to your shows, buy your merch, listen to your music, whatever, and I think when you start to maybe sort of lose a little bit of that sparkle of how wonderful this is, you can sniff it out. And I don't think we wanted to get to a point where we're just up there going through the motions and uninspired and whatever. And I don't want that to show, because then you're tarnishing whatever you've built. So it was necessary for us. I got to start another band [HELL OR HIGHWATER] that I had some of the best years of my life in, met some of my best friends — like the drummer of HELL OR HIGHWATER plays the drums in ATREYU now. So, everything happens for a reason. Sometimes you gotta — what is it? Distance makes the heart grow fonder. And our band has gone through different phases of life where we've kind of gotten to really like re-fall in love with this and re-appreciate who we are as people and what we make together and why that's special. And not a lot of bands, I think, get the opportunity to do that, and I think that it just kind of puts us in a place where we're almost 30 years into this now and we still have this kind of youthful excitement about playing in a band still, 'cause we've had these moments of like reinvigoration. So it's cool."

Reflecting on the fact that he previously played drums for ATREYU but is now focusing completely on singing after sharing lead vocals with Alex Varkatzas for most of the band's nearly three-decade existence, Brandon said: "It kind of goes back to what I just said. Everything happens for a reason. If we wouldn't have gone on hiatus — what is it now? 10-some odd years ago? Or longer, 15 years ago — I wouldn't have started another band that I just sang in. I wouldn't have gone on tour with bands like THE DARKNESS and AVENGED [SEVENFOLD] and SLIPKNOT and STONE SOUR and gotten to be, like, 'Wow, what do great frontmen do? How do I apply myself to that and learn what that is?' When the time came for me to make that transition, I would've known what to do with it.

"But it was fun for me [to focus completely on singing]," he continued. "I'm comfortable in front. There's a bit of, like, being a drummer where — I call it the Lars [Ulrich] effect. You can tell Lars doesn't wanna fucking sit down up there. That's why he gets up and walks around his drums all the fucking time. So I love not just sitting in the back. I love being closer to people and kind of having that better connection. I'm loving it. It's awesome."

ATREYU's latest studio album, "The End Is Not The End", came out in April via Spinefarm.

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 has 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".

Photo credit: Sean Stiegeimeier