Credit: Jonah Bayer (writer), Travis Shinn (photographer)
The same thing can be said about Atreyu’s music. Despite the fact that metalcore has now fully transitioned from VFW halls to Hot Topic, the band have always felt a need to evolve instead of blindly fitting in with the masses. Part of the evolution on Congregation of the Damned comes lyrically, as Varkatzas stretches out to address government corruption as much as his own personal demons. “I wanted to have every song have both a political and personal meaning at the same time,” says the typically apolitical frontman. “I think the leaders of our country are full of shit; I’m not super intelligent and don’t follow politics very much, but for the past few years I have. So there are a few songs where I just kind of open my mouth and throw out a ‘What the fuck?’ because I think we’re getting screwed,” he continues. “Right now I think the few people in charge are leading us like lemmings to the slaughter and they’re picking our pockets and throwing us off the cliff at the same time, so that’s kind of where the title Congregation of the Damned came from.”
And if you’re part of an act that has ripped off Atreyu’s massive breakdowns and arpeggio-infused leads over the years, you’re not safe from the band’s fire either. “We’re sickened with how mundane a lot of bands are today,” Saller says when asked what he thinks of the current music scene. “There are so many copy-and-paste bands out there and we don’t want to sound like them, even though that’s something that we started.” In the simplest sense, Congregation of the Damned is as much a gigantic middle finger to those aforementioned acts as it is the sound of Atreyu finding their identity at a distinct moment in time. “We don’t want to get pigeonholed into one place because that’s just who we were at that time; we all still love vampire movies and books and dark imagery and all that stuff—but we don’t want our music to be all about that,” Saller says. “We’d rather evolve into something that’s cooler than what we started out doing.”
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