August Burns Red write songs that understand why the pit exists in the first place. The Pennsylvania heavyweights have shared blistering new single Sonic Salvation, featuring Jamie Hails, ahead of forthcoming album Season of Surrender, due June 5 via Fearless Records.
The track arrives loaded with everything August Burns Red have long done better than most: punishing breakdowns, massive gang-shout choruses and riffs thick enough to leave dents. But beneath the force sits something more generous. ‘Sonic Salvation’ is built around music itself as refuge, release and community.
Guitarist JB Brubaker says it was the first song written for the new record, designed to create more vocal space for Jake Luhrs while leaning harder into the band’s hardcore roots. The addition of Hails pushes it further, adding an extra serrated edge.
Luhrs frames the song more broadly: a tribute to music’s ability to pull listeners back to memories, shut out outside noise and create the scene that gives so many people belonging in the first place.
That idea runs through the accompanying video, which features fans singing and playing along, nodding to the kind of loyalty August Burns Red have built over nearly two decades. Plenty of bands talk about community. Few sustain it this long.
Season of Surrender also includes guest turns from Mike Hranica of The Devil Wears Prada and members of Make Them Suffer, suggesting a record keen to bridge scenes rather than sit inside one.
The band are currently on a North American co-headline run with The Amity Affliction before returning to Australia and New Zealand this September and October for headline dates supported by Bloom and I Promised The World.
In a genre often obsessed with heaviness as posture, August Burns Red still understand that the strongest thing music can do is hold people together.
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