How Stray From The Path made their 10th album Euthanasia feel like a nuclear blast
On “Ladder Work,” the final track from Long Island metalcore band Stray From The Path’s latest album, Euthanasia, fans hear a chirpy voice deliver one of the most 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 only remaining founding member, Tom Williams explains. The quote was poignant to him, particularly after writing an entire album that feels like a nuclear blast of horror and rage at the state his home country is in. It’s the band’s 10th since their formation in 2001, and after two decades of politically incendiary, hip-hop-indebted metalcore, this is their bleakest and most furious.
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“III” hits back at a trigger-happy police force; “Guillotine” threatens exploitative rich elites; “Law Abiding Citizen” covers everything from QAnon to the Gaza Strip to J.K. Rowling, “We Didn’t Start The Fire” style. It ends with “Ladder Work,” a track that settles on the message that the world is ultimately 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 — completed by vocalist Drew Dijorio, drummer Craig Reynolds and bassist Anthony Altamura — were teenagers when they began in the Long Island hardcore scene, and their story begins with years of hard 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 hotel pools at night with a bar of soap in lieu of a place to bathe, and the next morning, they’d gatecrash breakfast and eat until they got 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 top of that, their explicit and radical politics often didn’t land with their audience, 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 didn’t receive a warm response. “We were getting attacked by Nazis, and no one cared. Now, we play that song, and people fucking get it. We’ve always had to wait for people to catch up to us,” Williams adds.
Before their ninth album, 2019’s Internal Atomics, the band took part in a humanitarian trip to Kenya where they helped to provide clean water. They came home feeling inspired, with a newfound belief in the power 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 once the time rolled around to follow that album up with Euthanasia, their enthusiasm was drained. Touring had become exhausting, and Williams and Dijorio, in particular, were often butting heads. Once the pandemic hit, there were times when the members didn’t touch their instruments for months. And this was in addition to the devastating political developments they were 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 started trading demos back and forth between the U.S. and Reynolds’ base in the U.K., it was hard to find 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 method to help them get their groove back: The pair started sharing their remote writing sessions on the livestreaming platform Twitch. Soon, they were attracting hundreds of followers daily, with fans providing feedback and ideas for developing songs in real time. In fact, the track “Guillotine” features a guitar pan that was suggested 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 complete, another crushing setback hit the band when Reynolds fractured his back in an accident days before he was set to fly to the U.S. for recording. His recovery pushed studio time back by four 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 process for a band that were used to wrapping up albums in two or three weeks. But as it turns out, the world might be readier than ever to receive 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 bright spot to this apocalyptically dark album, Williams reflects, 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 things ended up the way they did, and it brought us to the point now where everything feels super strong and better than we ever have been.”
