'We’ve Never Really Done That As A Band': August Burns Red Go Behind The Scenes Of New Album, 'Season Of Surrender'

"We wanted to try to recapture some of that fire from our early days," says August Burns Red guitarist JB Brubaker.

August Burns Red(Credit: Paxton Powell)

For 23 years now, Pennsylvania metalcore icons August Burns Red have been staples of the hardcore scene.

Forming in 2003, it took almost no time for the group to kick things off, releasing their debut in 2005, and cementing their line-up with the addition of vocalist Jake Luhrs and bassist Dustin Davidson the next year.

Since then, constant touring and a prolific release schedule have seen August Burns Red become a name which is hard to ignore.

In April, the group announced their first headline dates Down Under in seven years. Visiting across September and October 2026, they’ll be joined by rising Australian heavy group Bloom and Texas five-piece I Promised The World. Last in Australia opening arena shows for Polaris in 2023, now it’s August Burns Red’s turn to be under the spotlight.

The forthcoming tour dates undoubtedly give diehard fans something else to look forward, especially now that August Burns Red have released their eleventh studio album, Season Of Surrender, today.

With new material under their belt, and tour dates on the horizon, founding guitarist JB Brubaker took some time to share some of the behind-the-scenes stories of the making of Season Of Surrender.

Demos On The Road

Fact one: we recorded the demos for the songs while we were on tour last spring with Trivium and Bullet For My Valentine. Dustin, our bass player/guitar player, engineered all of the demos that we made and we used these as the backbone for our pre-production for the album.

Lyrical Shake Up

Next one, Jake and Brent [Rambler, guitar] began working on the vocals and lyrics on day one in the studio. Usually, vocals for us had been the last thing that happened in maybe the last two or three weeks.

But on this record, they spent six weeks recording every day, writing and recording every day on just the vocals and lyrics while the rest of the band was working in a separate room at the studio recording the music. And I think this helped us push the vocals and the lyrics to new heights.

The Changing Faces Of Behemoth

The song Behemoth is the song that went through more changes than any ABR song we've ever written.

We put that song through two very heavy pre-production sessions that changed the song dramatically both times, and we re-wrote the ending four or five times before we finally arrived on an ending. But we're very happy with how it came out. It was worth it!

Album Artwork

The artwork was done by a buddy of ours named David Salinas, who's designed for us in the past. He had some really killer ideas that we had to nix because they just weren't quite hitting the mark. And then he eventually drew this pluming tree that we ended up using for the album cover.

We all love it, also recognising that it's maybe not the most metal-looking cover of all time, but I think it's very August Burns Red as we're a band that visually doesn't tend to lean into the darker visuals. We’ve never really done that as a band. So I'm quite fond of the album artwork.

The Return Of Drop C

Dustin also wanted me to mention that this is the first time in two albums that we were writing songs in Drop C tuning again. Modern metal has been very downtuned as of late, a lot of bands are tuning obscenely low and very sludgy and stuff, which is cool.

But we wanted to try to recapture some of that fire from our early days. And we tried to do that by writing some songs in the original tuning we used to play in!

August Burns Red’s Season Of Surrender is out now. Tickets to their upcoming Australian tour are on sale now.