On “Ladder Work,” the ultimate monitor from Long Island metalcore band Stray From The Path’s newest album, Euthanasia, followers hear a chirpy voice ship one of the chilling answering machine messages you’ve ever heard. “Hello! To meet the criteria required for euthanasia, you must have an incurable, constant state of unbearable suffering. If you think you qualify, please press one.”
“Every day, there’s some sort of unbearable suffering, where some new law has passed that says people can’t be in control of their bodies anymore or children are shot up. Every day, there’s something horrible,” guitarist, and the band’s solely remaining founding member, Tom Williams explains. The quote was poignant to him, significantly after writing a complete album that feels like a nuclear blast of horror and rage on the state his residence nation is in. It’s the band’s tenth since their formation in 2001, and after twenty years of politically incendiary, hip-hop-indebted metalcore, that is their bleakest and most livid.
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“III” hits again at a trigger-happy police power; “Guillotine” threatens exploitative wealthy elites; “Law Abiding Citizen” covers every thing from QAnon to the Gaza Strip to J.Ok. Rowling, “We Didn’t Start The Fire” model. It ends with “Ladder Work,” a monitor that settles on the message that the world is finally unsalvageable.
“There was a lot to be pissed about, in a time where there wasn’t fucking anything to even be happy about,” Williams says. “There’s times where you’ll be pissed, and then you move on with your life and you got cool shit going on. But over the pandemic, rather than ‘Today was a good day and tomorrow’s not,’ it was just like, ‘Which level of fucking misery and anger is today?’ [The album] stems from that hopeless feeling of what else can we do here?”
Stray From The Path — accomplished by vocalist Drew Dijorio, drummer Craig Reynolds and bassist Anthony Altamura — have been youngsters after they started within the Long Island hardcore scene, and their story begins with years of laborious and thankless work. “To be in a band in the 2000s was really hard. It [took] a lot of luck and a lot of stupidity,” Williams reminiscences. On tour, they’d sneak into resort swimming pools at night time with a bar of cleaning soap in lieu of a place to wash, and the following morning, they’d gatecrash breakfast and eat till they obtained kicked out. “We would just do insane shit to get by because we didn’t have any money. It was fun at the time, but you look back on it, you think, ‘What sane person would do this?’ We were too young to know how hard it was.”
On prime of that, their specific and radical politics typically didn’t land with their viewers, Williams remembers. “No one liked us for years. We didn’t fucking sell shit, [and] people didn’t listen to us — it was dark,” he says. In 2017, the band dropped the single “Goodnight Alt-Right” and did not obtain a heat response. “We have been getting attacked by Nazis, and nobody cared. Now, we play that music, and other people fucking get it. We’ve all the time needed to await individuals to catch as much as us,” Williams provides.
Before their ninth album, 2019’s Internal Atomics, the band took half in a humanitarian journey to Kenya the place they helped to offer clear water. They got here residence feeling impressed, with a newfound perception within the energy of unity that they channeled into the album. “We saw people like Rico [Huntjens] from Hardcore Help and Ross [Floyd] from Actions Not Words, and how they gave up their lives to help people in need. It felt like we could do more, and there was hope.” But as soon as the time rolled round to observe that album up with Euthanasia, their enthusiasm was drained. Touring had turn into exhausting, and Williams and Dijorio, specifically, have been typically butting heads. Once the pandemic hit, there have been occasions when the members didn’t contact their devices for months. And this was along with the devastating political developments they have been all witnessing. “[Last time] we felt so good, and this time we just feel so bad. Now it’s just like, ‘There’s no hope.’ It was a very depressing feeling from a very depressing and angry time in our lives.”
So when Williams and Reynolds began buying and selling demos forwards and backwards between the U.S. and Reynolds’ base within the U.Ok., it was laborious to search out a spark. “I don’t know if I ever thought about quitting myself, but I was definitely thinking if someone else quit, I was done,” Williams admits. It took an unconventional methodology to assist them get their groove again: The pair began sharing their distant writing classes on the livestreaming platform Twitch. Soon, they have been attracting tons of of followers day by day, with followers offering suggestions and concepts for creating songs in actual time. In reality, the monitor “Guillotine” options a guitar pan that was recommended by a commenter. “We were like, ‘Holy shit, this is replacing what we know of to grow our band,’” Williams says. “No one’s ever done that before, let you in on the entire writing process of an album. We really showed people a full-on look under the hood of the car.”
With writing full, one other crushing setback hit the band when Reynolds fractured his again in an accident days earlier than he was set to fly to the U.S. for recording. His restoration pushed studio time again by 4 months. “It was another big fucking wind taken out of our sails,” Williams says. “I’m just glad that he’s OK [now] because we were like, ‘Is he gonna be able to play drums ever again?’ It was a crazy time that I don’t want to relive ever again. But he puts a lot of work in to make sure he’s healthy and that he can tour.”
All in all, it was a two-year-long course of for a band that have been used to wrapping up albums in two or three weeks. But because it seems, the world may be readier than ever to obtain an album like Euthanasia. “It’s hard to run from it now,” Williams says. “Two months ago, someone went into a school and shot 21 people — 19 kids — and the cops just stood there on camera for like 70 minutes. How could you watch that and not know that there’s something wrong? The reality has caught up with the stuff we talk about.”
If there’s a shiny spot to this apocalyptically darkish album, Williams displays, it’s that Stray From The Path have a new lease on life. “We get along better than we ever have, we’re making the best music of our career, and we’re having a lot of fun doing it,” he says. “I’m glad issues ended up the way in which they did, and it introduced us to the purpose now the place every thing feels tremendous sturdy and higher than we ever have been.”
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