August Burns Red: Filling In The Bookshelf

Following the release of their album Guardians in 2020, AUGUST BURNS RED have returned once again with a brand new EP. Titled, Guardians Sessions, the six track EP will be released on April 16th via Fearless Records. Serving as a bonus disc to last year’s Guardians, the EP features two songs that were left off of the album for creative reasons, two all new covers and two reworked versions of tracks from the record. Bassist Dustin Davidson broke the brand new EP down piece by piece when we caught up with AUGUST BURNS RED ahead of their latest creative expansion.

“The two songs on there are B-sides from Guardians, they didn’t make the record for what I think are obvious reasons. They stand out, if you listen to the album and imagine those two songs on there they really stand out to me as not fitting the vision and vibe of Guardians. Icarus is all major and I do the singing part in it which is very different and so when we listened to the record as a collective, Icarus and Standing In The Storm stood out. These are songs that we want our fans to hear but they don’t fit the vibe of the album.”

Both Standing In The Storm and Icarus have been released prior to the EP’s arrival on the 16th. As Davidson points out, both tracks feel clearly distinct from the rest of the Guardians material but can still stand on their own two feet. They keep the EP grounded in the world of AUGUST BURNS RED whilst the other tracks push those boundaries a bit further. “We do always try to push the boundaries on the genre of metal, throwing in some influences from other genres. Not all of us listen to metal, I’d say metal is the genre I listen to least when I’m at home.”

“I didn’t really sit down to focus on writing wacky or different parts but they do come out sometimes, they are fun to develop those parts that are clean because there is so much space to add different instruments to a part that is a clean section whereas with metal if you’re writing like a breakdown, the guitars and the gain structure doesn’t really give you the room to throw those elements in there.”

As previously mentioned, the remaining four tracks are made up of two new covers and two tracks from Guardians that are reimagined as acoustic, instrumental tracks. Whilst the reprise tracks shows them stripping back some of the AUGUST BURNS RED elements, the covers see them engulf the original material and cover it with a metalcore shaded coat of paint. Trying their hand at tackling the monolithic Chop Suey by SYSTEM OF A DOWN as well as creating a metal instrumental of the Westworld theme, the covers work as a perfect balance to the stripped back tracks. 

“We love doing those reprise tracks like stripping down the songs, like I mentioned with writing metal songs about how the gain structures take up so much space, so it’s just really cool for us creatively to strip down those songs and remove those elements and start with an acoustic guitar and build on it from there. Some of the sounds are like us banging on a table and we’ve used coat zippers before so it’s just a really fun creative process to do and to hear those songs in a different way,” he explains. “It’s so fun to be able to be creative and strip those songs down and hear them in a different light. It’s just really fun to take a song and, apart from with Chop Suey because it’s already metal, but with the Westworld theme and we’ve done Zelda in the past, take those songs and make them metal, make them sound like an AUGUST BURNS RED song. I love how the Westworld theme turned out and it’s just fun for us to get in the studio and do those tracks.”

With the Guardians Sessions EP, AUGUST BURNS RED get to flex their creative muscles in ways that fans will not have expected. Combining a covers EP, an acoustic EP and a B-sides EP all into one package, it serves as a great add-on to the somewhat streamlined approach of last year’s release. “I don’t feel restricted to what I can and can’t write for the band, I feel like if you look at the bookshelf that is AUGUST BURNS RED‘s creativity, there’s no bookends. It’s like what else can we throw in here, we can throw a lot of different sounds into the band.”

“We know what our fans like and we know what isn’t the most popular amongst them so I think Guardians is a pretty good example of that, like we know our fans love it when we do heavy stuff and rhythmic stuff and breakdowns and so I think Phantom Anthem and Found In Far Away Places, those are some records where we did go out there and do some more experimental stuff and I feel like, not that we stopped doing that but I feel like we drew back a little bit and really wanted to give back to our fans and that’s what Guardians is to me. It’s a dark and heavy album and we are always going to sprinkle in the stuff that helps make us unique and expands on the genre I just think we know what our fans like and after so many years of being a band, we want to continue to give back to everybody and write stuff that we know our fans are going to like.”

Guardians Sessions is out now via Fearless Records.

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