Atreyu?  Now that’s a name I haven’t heard in a long time.  Not that they’ve exactly gone anywhere, but, shamefully, I have to admit that after a certain point a decade ago, I just stopped caring about anything they did.  Everything post Lead Sails Paper Anchor just didn’t have any spark of life left in it, and my opinion is staunchly that we’ll never get another The Curse again.  Still, you can’t say they haven’t been pushing through, and after a few solid years of a lineup switcheroo, The End is Not the End is poised to be, in their own words, their heaviest and most adventurous album yet.

The creative seeds of The End is Not the End were sown in two distinct transplantations of the members of Atreyu to different parts of the world, with two different means to the same end of a wellspring of creativity.  First, the quintet went to Tokyo, just to shake things up.  “Tokyo made us feel like kids again,” says former drummer and co-lead vocalist turned frontman Brandon Saller. “We’d write for a few hours in the morning, then go out and get lost in all this inspiration…we knew we were on to something.”  From there, Atreyu camped out on San Juan Island, off the coast of Washington state, and hunkered down with producer Matt Pauling.  “It was the polar opposite of Tokyo.  We didn’t leave the house for four days and wrote some of the heaviest songs on the record,” says Saller of the experience.  With all of the creative juices flowing, The End is, according to Saller, “[the] heaviest and most metal record we’ve made.”  And you know what?  It kinda is.  Atreyu has always been a hard band to pin down (my dad less than affectionately refers to them as “vampire music”), but The End takes the blend of metalcore, arena rock, punk and alternative and skews it heavily in the direction of Swedish melodeath, which is an interesting and welcome facet to Atreyu’s sound.  The twin guitar harmonies that have always been a staple of their sound are much more explicitly At the Gates coded this time around, and the chunky, chugging riffs are as sharp as they’ve ever been in the band’s early prime.  It’s also very nice to hear bassist Marc “Porter” McKnight step fully into the co-lead vocalist void left when Saller moved to the front.  His harsh vocals are a killer counterpart to Saller’s signature croon, and when their vocals come together, The End really comes alive.

It is a shame, though, that a lot of times these killer moments of actual weight and heaviness get their wings clipped by a totally predictable and bland chorus that sucks all the air out of the lungs of what could be a standout modern metal track.  Granted, Atreyu have always been known for hitting the Big Chorus, but like…listen to what you get on “Lip Gloss and Black” or “Right Side of the Bed” and then listen to “All For You” and try to tell me it’s the same thing.  It’s not that the vocals are bad; on the contrary, Saller has come into his own in the lead role and he showcases a huge range on The End.  It’s just very generic songwriting shoehorned into some of the best ideas Atreyu has had in a while.  Perhaps the biggest disappointment is that when The End works, it really works.  The guitar pyrotechnics of Dan Jacobs and Travis Miguel are just as electrifying as always, and tracks like “Dead”, “Ego Death” and “Glass Eater” storm ahead with lightning speed and really, truly exciting ideas…until it falls flat, that is.

“We just refuse to become boring,” says Saller on Atreyu’s legacy.  “We’re not chasing what’s cool.  We’re not chasing anything.  We’re trying to do what isn’t being done and to play exactly what we want to hear.  And somehow, 25-some-odd years later, it’s still growing.  We still have much more to accomplish.”  While I would argue that there are plenty of moments on The End is Not the End that are explicitly boring, there are also enough good ideas here that prove Atreyu are not out of tricks in their bag yet.  They do still have more to accomplish, and if they lean into the right aspects of what they’ve cultivated here, they could really be on to something.  Don’t count them out yet.

—– Ian

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The End is Not the End is available now on Spinefarm Records.  For more information on Atreyu, visit their Facebook page.