August Burns Red Season Of Surrender Down Under…

‘Season Of Surrender’ is the idea that I’m trying to give you all of these experiences in hopes that you would resonate with at least one of them and then self-reflect and think about something that you hold close to your heart, and surrendering that.’

Jake Luhrs, the powerful voice in August Burns Red explains the beating heart in the band’s new album, Season Of Surrender. A heart that beats pure and true yet is not afraid to confront his demons, Luhrs opens on where the lyrics come from, and his own journey.

‘I’ve experienced everything on that record. It’s about the experience of that situation through the lens of the person that’s experiencing it. I know that maybe you haven’t experienced all of the things. There’s depression, addiction, grief, betrayal, narcissism, right? Self-sabotage. There are all these different things, and I’m not saying that you have experienced all of those things through your lens but I would imagine that you could connect to one of them at least?’

‘It’s that thing that’s close to your heart, that I want to invite people into doing in that season of surrender. By giving something that has control over you, whether that’s a traumatic experience from the past or that is an addiction or whatever’s controlling, it’s a part of your identity, and it’s an unhealthy part of your identity. If you can let go of it, heal, break, overcome, whatever, you now are going to be a more pure form of who you were intended to be, and therefore you’re going to live out your life that you were intended to live. Instead of the world saying, “Come into this box. Be a part of this team. Be this guy. Make this money.” Or trauma saying, “Hey, you know, your dad was verbally abusive. Talk to other people like this.” You can take that, break it, and now you become more of yourself. That’s what this whole record is really about lyrically.’

The act of sacrificing through giving is one of the most important aspects that creates Luhrs character. Whether it’s his charity work, running a gym to support positive mental health or his rewarding lyrics, Luhrs identity is shaped by this calling.

‘I look at God as a dad, I didn’t really have much of a father figure in my life, and so I wanted somebody to lead me and teach me how to be a man, you know? Somebody who has a good heart and I’ve been through a lot of stuff in my life. The only thing that for me personally was a constant was my faith. That’s where I get the strength to do the things that I do or pursue what I wanna pursue. It’s not a religion. I don’t really fit a box. I don’t like politics. I don’t fit in mainstream Christianity boxes. The only thing I trust is my faith and my connection with God and listening to what I believe God’s saying to me, right? And that could be through an experience, you know, visual, audible, journaling, right?’

‘I look at darkness as an energy and as a force, and I think that that’s the real enemy. I don’t think people are evil. I think people are broken and hurting. So, I wanna be a light. I wanna be able to combat the darkness, and the way that I can do that is by encouraging people to get healthy, whether that’s breaking from a traumatic experience they had, breaking from an addiction that they’ve got going on, breaking from their perspective on how they view themselves, whatever it might be, right?’ The only way that I can do that is by sharing my own struggle, my own difficulties, because that’s where people can meet me.’

‘I have a gym that’s about mental and physical health because I wanna help people get healthy and better. My charity is about mental health in the music scene, and I wanna help people connect and heal, break cycles. Then the music is my life being written out on paper.’

As the band tick over twenty years and nearly a dozen albums later, a music scene and fanbase can trap a band into doing more of the same, or not. Either way, it seems bands cannot win. How does Luhrs ride this challenge?

‘If you have a desire of your heart, there’s two things that I think you have to do. You have to not care what other people think because they’re gonna stop you. The other one is you gotta stop thinking about how you feel and just do it. What’s important for me, I can only speak for myself, right, through the process of recording this record, is I can’t care what you what you think, and I also can’t care how I feel about doing this. If this is truly what I wanna do and other people think it’s cringe or they think it sounds the same, that doesn’t matter. It’s just noise. Both of those things are just noise, right? You have to do what you’re called to do. The beautiful thing for those people is our music scene is so massive that there is a slew of bands to choose from. If you don’t like August Burns Red, that’s okay. It’s not like it’s the end of the world.

‘Of course, we wanted to keep our roots, and then we wanted to really be able to showcase what we’ve learned over the years because we all do continuing education as individuals in our instrumentation, right? We wanted to really just write the best ABR record we possibly could, and we didn’t wanna go to trends. We didn’t wanna do anything mainstream, like the mainstream metalcore sound that’s going on right now.’

There are several other great bands out there as Luhrs confesses, a few of them represented on the new album such as our own Polaris and Make Them Suffer, which leads nicely to talk of the upcoming Australian tour, the band’s first headliner in seven years.

‘We were there, I think it was ’24, with Polaris, when they released their new record, and that was, holy smokes, dude. Those guys rip dude! The fan base that they have in Australia it’s just incredible. But this is our first headliner in seven years. We’re all excited ’cause we got this new record, so we get to play some new music! You know? It’s gonna be a ripper, man. It’s gonna be a lot of fun.’

‘I met a guy at a bar several years ago in Australia and, funny enough, he had a massive hole in his hand because he got bit by a spider and the venom ate his flesh. That was wild. Never seen that before. But he said, “You know what’s funny is in America, you Americans, you live to work. Here in Australia, we work to live.” That shift of mindset, that culture that you guys have is attractive to me. I think that’s a beautiful way to live.’

Interview By Iain McCallum

Catch August Burns Red on tour with Bloom and I Promised The World, tickets from Destroy All Lines…