I **still remember the day that Atreyu’s third album, A Death-Grip on Yesterday, came across my 8th grade desk, straight from my most trusted music source, a fellow kid known only as Bowl Cut.**

He told me three things about the band: They’re French (they’re from California), this was their debut (it was their third), and it was about to change everything. He was right about the last one – for the genre and for me.

A Death-Grip on Yesterday - Atreyu — A Death-Grip on Yesterday – Atreyu

It’s strange to review an album you loved as a teen. There’s so much nostalgia, of course, but there’s also everything that came after it – both for myself and the music. Atreyu inspired a musical movement that I lived, breathed, and moshed through, and it’s hard to separate this from the work that started it all. Also, I’m quite a different person to the one who so desperately snatched Bowl Cut’s recommendation and ran home to LimeWire.

Yet hitting play on the 20th-anniversary vinyl takes me all the way back to that 2006 listen, to the heavy guitars and the effortless interplay of two seemingly incongruous voices. It’s everything they’d already proven themselves so adept at on their two previous albums – their actual debut Suicide Notes and Butterfly Kisses and follow-up The Curse – heightened and pushed to its limit. And this is what set Atreyu apart. Everything about them feels oppositional: One drop-tuned guitar chugs while the other squeals; the super sweet vocals wrap around the gnarly crunch of screams; the lyrics cry for it all to end while never losing hope that things can get better. This conflict is at the very core of the band, and it rips through every song. At their best, you can feel yourself being pulled in every direction.

Enter “Shameful.” Although “Ex’s and Oh’s” was their breakthrough hit, this is the one that captures everything that makes this album a genre classic 20 years on. It snarls and snaps, like a chained dog desperate for blood. But then that tortured chorus, the pain that drips off the clean vocals:

Here’s to lowering caskets of old friends
Choice and consequence
We’ll birth a new day
with the death of an old and
Start over! Start over!
Here’s to burying hatchets in those
Who you’d never call your friends
We’ll birth a new day
with the death of an old and
Start over! Start over!

It’s a melody that sticks long after the distortion fades.

It’s a wry look at grief that nonetheless oozes pain, its vulnerability wrapped in something so easy to sing. The roaring screams that precede and follow this pronouncement leave the band’s duality bare for all to hear. Even the sentiment is hopeful – “start over!” – despite it taking place at a graveside. It’s a tiny moment that captures not just this band or the album, but the genre as a whole. And this is why A Death-Grip on Yesterday stands the test of time today. The band that helped define melodic metalcore was evolving again, leaning into the earworm melodies and anthemic choruses, pushing them to the forefront. That seems standard now, but certainly wasn’t at the time. It’s impossible to imagine the explosion of bands like A Day To Remember without it.

But this can be a double-edged dagger, as it is also a reminder of the things lost, or at least changed, by the genre’s mainstreaming. After all, lead single “Ex’s and Oh’s” ended up on the Madden NFL 07 soundtrack and Guitar Hero II, something unimaginable even when Atreyu formed in 1998. And this same year, punk stalwarts AFI released Decemberunderground and landed on cable, showing you could pull fame off but at the price of heaviness. A Death-Grip on Yesterday is one of the genre’s last true snarl moments, around the time we started to believe you could actually get this on the airwaves. A Death-Grip on Yesterday slams into the stomach with about as much force as the California five-piece can muster, but while it’s this force that made it debut at No. 9 on the Billboard 200, it’s also what helped usher in the commercialization of the outsiders. You can’t blame Atreyu for this selling out of a whole genre, but listening back does remind you of how it used to sound before the mainstream sheen.

Maybe now is a good time to say this isn’t a bad thing: When this sugar is applied just right, it’s some of the best moments. The chorus on “My Fork in the Road (Your Knife in My Back)” has played in my head once a week since that fateful day with Bowl Cut, while “Your Private War” became my own creed for a teenage while: “So raise your voices and hold your hopes up high, Tell your stories, run your mouth, and tell your lies.” Across its nine songs, there are few moments that don’t stand out. Instead, the whole album becomes a masterclass in how to weave vocals, rivalling giants Alexisonfire and Underoath. Few albums stand the 20-year test of time, but A Death-Grip on Yesterday is a great album that sounds like a genre changing and maturing in real time.

* * *

Back to that desk in 2006.

I didn’t know any of the above. I just understood the rage and the angst that dripped off every word and the loneliness of being an outsider. Atreyu offered a refuge, a spot between the distortion and the growls to sit a while. I didn’t know it was going to help reshape a genre, or bring metalcore into the mainstream, or even be significant outside my headphones.

Hell, I thought they were French!

All I knew was it was mine to growl and cry along to, to be seen and embraced by the righteous rage. In short, then and now, it makes me feel less alone: For all the superlatives A Death-Grip on Yesterday has earned over its 20 years – all of them deserved – this might be the highest compliment.

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