Story Of The Year are rediscovering their prime, having just released their best record in recent times, A.R.S.O.N. Serving as a real return to form with an obvious natural progression of sound and talent, A.R.S.O.N is the result of a band with no agendas and nothing to prove, making the music that they want to make. Sitting down with founding bassist Adam Russell, I gained an insight into how the record was crafted both physically and mentally, as well as how the band managed to find themselves after years of lineup changes and a hiatus thrown in there, too.
In preparation for the interview, I scoured the bands’ Reddit page- sometimes a dangerous thing to do. In this case, I could immediately see fans were loving A.R.S.O.N, with some commenting on how the band seems to get better with age. I bring this up to Russell, and he stops me right there “Wait- there’s a Story Of The Year Subreddit that actually exists?” He asks, bewildered. Oh buddy, there sure is. Back to the question, he comments “That has been our hope, that we get better with age. I feel like that’s every musician’s hope… I do feel confident that we’ve learned from our mistakes… We’ve also gotten more open to working with ideas and having our ideas shot down, not being married to any specific thing and being willing to be flexible in a creative environment. Part of that is what helped us become open to co-writing.”
Enter Colin Brittain, producer co-writer and current member of Linkin Park. “He’s an incredible writer”, Russell acknowledges, “The best part about that is that he’s a few years younger than us. So he got to see our band as a young person in high school, and he was a fan. He has an outside perspective that really helps us understand our sound from the outside rather than this little box where we’ve been banging around, making each other miserable for years.”
While Russell feels that with age the band has become wiser and better, reflecting on the album he’s hesitant to call it their best work right away. “It’s hard to put anything up against something like a debt album that hits at a specific perfect time and has this nostalgic resonance. But I would say that these last two albums together are the best work we’ve ever done. Tear Me To Pieces was missing a little bit of what made Story Of The Year, Story Of The Year. But all in all, yes- I think we are doing our best work right now.” He gets there eventually.
Listening to A.R.S.O.N, there’s so many great moments on this record. Opening with the rage-fuelled “Gasoline”, it’s chaotic from the get go. In the studio, it pushed them to work more cohesively together. “We went to a place, lyrically- because we’ve been writing all the lyrics together in the room- that Dan was willing to go to, which is an approach we haven’t done yet… It’s just got that unhinged vibe that we haven’t really done yet, but Dan does so well vocally and tonally. I’m proud as shit that he was willing to go there and do something that I think surprised a lot of people in a positive way.”
And if you think the track is unhinged, the video takes that even further. It’s a full-blown action comedy packed into 3-minutes, with an incredible artistic vision from Russell himself. “It’s a direct sequel to War from out last album, which was an idea Ryan and I had based entirely on a movie within a movie… For “Gasoline”, I wanted to do a sequel so I wrote the whole thing and based it most off of Commando, the Arnold Schwarzenegger movie from the 80s…I ended up co-directing with Jordan Phoenix, our friend who has done a bunch of our videos… Since I wrote the thing and it was almost entirely my vision, I got pretty heavy handed and was really in there just making everyone’s lives hell because we were trying to make this huge thing on not enough money at all. I ended up editing it as well, which was insane- the hardest edit I’ve ever done and the hardest we’ve ever worked on set, but it was incredible.”
With his creative muscles fully flexed, Russell is feeling more than ready to fully embrace the A.R.S.O.N era, and with the reviews they’ve been receiving along with fans buzzing, it’s looking to be their healthiest and best era in a long time.
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