After many years wait metalcore legends Atreyu are returning to Australia in 2020 for a headlining tour. Showcasing songs from their latest album In Our Wake and armed with an arsenal of older fan favourites this will be a tour to remember. We caught up with Dan Jacobs guitarist of Atreyu before the tour kicks off. 

 

Firstly congrats on your recent engagement. It looks like 2020 is going to be a good year for you.

 

Thank you very much, I appreciate it. Yeah for a year that was meant to be pretty chill it’s already taken off. It’s exciting.

 

Looking back on last year how was the 20th anniversary tour?

 

It was awesome but surreal being a band for 20 years. A year or two in you can’t even imagine twenty years let alone three or four years down the road. Some bands careers don’t even last a few years so it’s wild to be still going doing our thing and have people appreciate it. Especially on the 20 year tour it was really interesting seeing people from over the years coming back and wearing their Atreyu shirts from tours over the years. A lot of these throwback shirts were showing up at every show. It was really interesting seeing our whole career lumped into one thing. Sometimes I forget how much stuff we’ve done and how many tours we’ve done, places we’ve been and songs we’ve written.

 

When you think about 2014 do you think it was important that the band took a little break to re-energize?

 

Absolutely, I feel like everybody was doing this from such a young age and didn’t know anything else other than being in this band. All we knew how to do was play music and were kind of getting fried from touring way too much. Some bands only last an album or two and then they’re done but we got five albums deep and are touring and writing constantly to a point where we were drowning. We needed to take a step back, we weren’t having fun anymore. We stopped and decided we weren’t done but wanted to take a break and find ourselves outside of the band. We came back and were a stronger group because of it. Everything that everybody was doing outside of the band in their time off strengthened everybody in the band. We couldn’t be doing what we are now if we hadn’t of stopped for a little bit.

 

It’s not long until you are back in Australia. You guys must be pretty stoked to be down here for a proper headline tour?

 

Yeah it’s been so long. We’ve been back a couple of times in the past six years but that was just a festival and support tour with Bullet For My Valentine. So to come back and do our thing and have longer to play it’ll be a good fun Atreyu show. It’s exciting to be able to headline in Australia and do our thing. 

 

Did the 20th anniversary tour give you some ideas for a setlist in Australia?

 

A little bit yeah. It’s an interesting thing from our perspective, we always try to play our top ten songs because they are crowd pleases. Once you get below that and start reaching a little bit deeper into the pockets of what we have available there’s only so many people that know certain songs. The 20 year tour allowed us to dig deeper by allowing people to choose the set. So we will have a couple of treats in there for the Australian tour.

 

When you were here back in 2016 with Bullet For My Valentine did you get a chance to explore Australia?

 

Yeah every time we come out we like to do what I call playcation. A lot of times we will come earlier or stay later. We try and use our down time to explore, try the local cuisine, going to the local zoo’s to play with kangaroos and koalas. The first time we ever came to Australia we flew into Brisbane and we couldn’t check into our hotel until the afternoon but got there really early in the morning. Our liaison said hey we are too early for check in so do you guys want to go to Steve Irwin’s animal park and play with kangaroos. We were like oh my god yeah. Australia is an amazing country and a lot of it reminds us of California. It’s one of our favourite places to tour.

 

Since you were here last you released a new album In Our Wake. You must be stoked with the response from fans?

 

Yeah to get a good response on any record is incredible but even more so being twenty years into your career and putting a record out and to have it do better than some of our past records have done, opening up new audiences and reaching places we have never reached before. Every major sport in the united states is playing our song “the time is now”. From the NFL who actually picked it up again this year it’s a song that they will play at least one time every game, every Sunday for the whole season. Stuff like that is crazy, we’ve had that before here and there. We’ve been in video games and movies before but to have it where every sporting event is playing your song is a really powerful thing. It’s crazy to see what that does for your spotify streams, it extends our reach in ways we have never extended before. It’s been an incredible experience after this long to still have a career.

The deluxe version also features a really cool acoustic version of “in our wake”. Do you enjoy grabbing the acoustic from time to time?

 

Yeah to be brutally honest the majority of Atreyu songs these days start on an acoustic then we switch over to electric and plug in that’s when it gets revved up. A good song you can play on any instrument and it will sound great, you don’t necessarily have to have distortion to make it be cool. We start on acoustic and by doing that it gives me multiple perspectives of the song. At the very beginning if we are trying to write a heavier song because it’s on acoustic you can also see how you can strip it down and make a nice mellow version. It’s a fun thing to do as a musician and as a writer to take one song and give it several different faces. You could slow it down an make it country sounding or speed it up and make it punk, or add horns and strings and take it in a different direction. We are all such creative people and we don’t like to be stuck in a box just playing heavy music.

 

One of my favourite live Atreyu memories is seeing you back in 2005 at The Gaellic Club in Sydney. The other bands playing were Norma Jean, Unearth and a little known Aussie band called Parkway Drive. Do you remember that tour?

 

I didn’t realise Parkway Drive were on that show that’s wild. I remember that whole tour was packed sold out rooms. That was our first official world headlining tour. So for us to get to include Australia for the first time in that mix was insane. Considering how successful Parkway Drive are now it’s crazy to think they were the local opener at the time.

 

Do you still enjoy playing an old favourite like “lip gloss and black” live?

 

Yeah that song has an energy to it that brings us back to our youth and what we were feeling at the time. It’s a different vibe song compared to some of our newer stuff. Our new stuff is a little bit more grand sounding. It’s  fun to play a few of the guitar solos from the mentality we had back then.

I noticed that Atreyu can really cross the bridge when it comes to having metal fans but at the same time punk and emo fans. It must be cool for you guys knowing you have a wide spectrum of fans?

 

I think we learned at the height of our original popularity that we were a gateway drug for people that didn’t like metal but liked softer music. People who didn’t think they would like metal but then they heard us and were like maybe I do like metal and harder music. We presented the music in a tasteful way bridging the gap between the soft and the heavy. That’s something that our band has always taken pride in and been very adamant about. Because we have so many different styles we like and want to have in our music. Our band likes the idea of getting everything we love about music and bringing it all into one band. It takes us in some interesting directions and makes our band very versatile. It allows us to play metal tours, rock tours and emo tours. Its cool and allows us to do so much more.   

 

Lastly you may not be able to say anything just yet but I noticed Atreyu posted a photo in the studio with Mark Hoppus. Can you elaborate on the photo at all?

 

We were writing some songs and Mark Hoppus came down because he was interested in doing some songs with us. We wrote a few songs with him, whether they will make the album or not we aren’t sure. We don’t normally write with other people, we usually do everything very internally. So we are trying writing with other people to see what extra spices can be tossed on the Atreyu entree. Maybe we will use it, maybe we wont but we are trying something different.

 

(interview by Christian Ross)  

 

 

Ticket Link: https://silverbacktouring.com.au/atreyu2020/