August Burns Red’s 11th studio album Season of Surrender has arrived.
Featuring guest appearances from The Devil Wears Prada’s Mike Hranica, Polaris’ Jamie Hails, and Make Them Suffer’s Alex Reade, it serves as the follow up to 2023’s Death Below.
They will soon grace our shores with the new album, with a huge Australian and New Zealand tour kicking off in September, where they’ll be joined by Bloom and I Promised the World. It will mark their first Australian headline tour in seven years, and first New Zealand shows in over a decade.
Ahead of that though, guitarist JB Brubaker gave us a track-by-track breakdown of their new album Season of Surrender.
“Legions” (Ft. Mike Hranica)
JB Brubaker: “Legions” is one of the heaviest songs, I think, that August Burns Red has ever written. We wanted to start the record with a real punch to the face, and that’s what this song is. I think this may have been the last song that I wrote musically for the album, and it’s one of only two songs that’s tuned down to Drop A.
It’s a little lower than we typically go which kind of adds to the heaviness. Mike Hranica is the guest feature on this song, Mike from The Devil Wears Prada. He’s a great friend of ours, we’ve been longtime friends with them and it was fun to get him to lend his vocals and to take the track over the top.
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“The Nameless”
This song was written entirely by Dustin Davidson who plays bass/guitar in the band. Dustin is really important to our writing process on the musical side, Dustin and I handle writing the actual music for the songs. But I did nothing on this particular song, it’s all Dustin. And the goal on this song for him was to write something that was really leaning into our older sound from the Messengers/Constellations days. He just wanted to write a really heavy, old-school sounding August Burns Red song.
But then he wrote this crazy breakdown in the middle that has this really groovy, almost Meshuggah kind of feel, which ABR doesn’t really do very often. And then he played this wild tapping guitar solo over it that makes no sense to me, but it sounds really cool. That’s not something we would’ve done back in the day, so it’s like this old-school track with this new element or flavour in it towards the end.
“Behemoth”
“Behemoth” was the song that went through the most changes of any song that we’ve ever written as a band, this song really went through the ringer multiple times. If you heard the original demo, you wouldn’t even recognise the song, but it was worth it.
The grinding, grueling rewrites and reorganising and restructuring came out great, and this ended up being the lead single for the album. And people seem pretty hyped on it, so I’m glad we put as much work into it as we did.
“Den of Thieves”
This song is one of the more guitar-centric tracks on the album, in my opinion. It’s very riff-oriented. It’s less crushing and bruising than a lot of the other songs. Dustin wrote the main hook in this song that kind of is the theme that happens throughout the track. And then we collabed on the structure and some of the other sections of the track. But a highlight for this one for me would be that there’s a duelling guitar solo, which I think is one of the only times we’ve ever done that as a band. Dustin plays a part and I play a part. Although I go first, I don’t want to steal his solo because it’s better than mine.
Dustin also wanted me to say that “Den Of Thieves” has a classic ABR old-school sound to it more so than some of the other stuff on the album. We intentionally did a really polyrhythmic progression on the final breakdown that I guess only music nerds would care about. But we think it’s cool the way that two different type signatures eventually line up and work together at the end.
“Sonic Salvation” (Ft. Jamie Hails)
This was the first song I wrote for the record and I wanted to write a song that had more space in it for vocals, something a little more simplistic in terms of the time signatures. And I also wanted it to have more of a hardcore lean than some of our more metal-leaning stuff. I love how this song came out. This is another song that went through quite a few changes along the way and rewrites, but it was definitely worth it in the end.
The section that Jamie [Hails] from Polaris sings on was a part that went through a big change. I had written a really straightforward hardcore riff that Dustin hated. I loved it, and we kind of went back and forth until finally it’s like, ‘Fine, I’ll rewrite that’. I kept the same vibe but made it much more metal. And then Jamie’s vocal takes it over the top.
It’s one of my favourite songs on the record, I love the vocals on it and I love how catchy it is. I think it’s the catchiest song on the record. Jamie was definitely someone that we wanted to work with, he’s a good friend. We love the Polaris guys, we mesh really well with them and get along well. And they kind of came up being ABR fans when they were younger. So we thought Jamie would be excited to be on a track, which he was. He was like, ‘Fuck yeah dude, I’d love to be a part of that’. So this collab worked out really organically.
“Cerebral Malfunction” (Ft. Make Them Suffer)
This song was very inspired by old-school metalcore for me. I was listening to a lot of Poison the Well, and I call this song my Poison the Well song in my head. I love that band and there’s definitely some chord choices and stuff that remind me of something that they would’ve done. But the feature, which is probably going to be the part of the song that people talk about the most, is Alex [Reade] from Make Them Suffer’s clean vocal. I don’t think we’ve ever had a female vocal on any of our songs before.
Jake [Luhrs] and our vocal producer, Grant, had the idea of doing this, having a clean female vocal over this interlude towards the end of the song. They sketched out an idea and then we were just pitching ideas of who might be a good fit for this. Jake brought up Alex, and it just so happened that Make Them Suffer was touring through the area while we were recording and they had an off day near Philadelphia, which was about an hour and a half from where we were. They came into the studio and she banged out her parts and did an amazing job, even though she was sick and she was feeling really bad about not being at a hundred percent, but no one will be able to tell. She did amazing.
And then Sean [Harmanis] also came to the studio and sprinkled his voice throughout the track as well, which is really cool. It was a very collaborative final product since they were able to get in the studio with us. It’s so much easier to do a guest vocal, I think, when you’re in the same room versus just sending a track out. So I think “Cerebral Malfunction” is a track that really stands out because of Alex’s voice, and I don’t think there’s another song like it in terms of the vibe of the track on this album.
“Tear of the Clouds”
“Tear of the Clouds” is a one-minute interlude track. Dustin wrote this beautiful clean guitar section as basically a segue into “Whispers Like Splinters”. And what’s cool about this one is that he tracked it really well the first time when he demoed it, and we ended up using a lot of the layers and takes that he did at home before we were even in the studio on the final version of the song.
“Whispers Like Splinters”
This is a very Dustin-heavy track as well. One thing that stands out here is it was written on a seven string. I believe this was the first song August Burns Red’s ever written and recorded on a seven string, so that was fun. Dustin wanted to try something different with that track and there’s definitely a heavier, lower, brooding side to it.
“S.O.S”
“S.O.S” stands for Season of Surrender. It’s kind of a title track, it’s where the title of the album came from. And Jake says “Season of Surrender” towards the end of the song during one of the final breakdowns. I wrote the song on tour in Europe in August of 2025, and it was an attempt to write something that was a pretty straightforward, classic August Burns Red metalcore song.
It’s tuned up to Drop C, which is the tuning we used for a lot of our old albums, the albums that put us on the map in the first place. Since then we’ve kind of tuned down more, but this is one of the few songs that we tuned up to Drop C again.
“New Horizons”
This is another song that I would consider to be a pretty classic-sounding August Burns Red track. It went through a fair amount of changes as well from pre-production to the final version, which benefited the track overall. And the song talks lyrically about a great loss. We lost a close friend and colleague, and Brent [Rambler] wrote the lyrics to this song. It’s about the passing of someone close and important to us.
“Forged By Failure”
This was a track that was made to be more of a journey. It’s a really long song and it has a long instrumental break in the middle that takes the listener on a bit of a ride. I’m really fond of this track. We had a huge rewrite for this one as well in the studio that really helped to bring the track together, whereas before it was kind of missing something or just felt a little bit disjointed. Our A&R at the label was pushing for this song to be a single. He was really loving it and he thought it would be cool to release a seven-minute single. We ultimately didn’t do it because we felt like it was kind of risky. But he’s like, ‘It’s just such a good song. You’re going to bury it at the end of the album and people aren’t going to hear it. I just think people should hear it’. We shot it down, but he was pushing for that.
He knew it was kind of a bold idea too, but I can’t see the seven-minute proggy August Burns Red song getting primo playlisting either and stuff like that in this short attention span era. But I love the song. I like long and progressive metal stuff, so that song speaks to me. But I understand that it may not be for those who have a shorter attention span.
August Burns Red’s Season of Surrender is out now. For complete tour and ticket information, see here.
AUGUST BURNS RED AUSTRALIA AND NEW ZEALAND 2026
Sunday, September 27th (18+)
Freo Social, Perth WA
Tuesday, September 29th (Licensed All Ages)
The Gov, Adelaide SA
Thursday, October 1st (18+)
170 Russell, Melbourne VIC
Friday, October 2nd (Licensed All Ages)
Liberty Hall, Sydney NSW
Saturday, October 3rd (18+)
King St Bandroom, Newcastle NSW
Sunday, October 4th (18+)
The Tivoli, Brisbane QLD
Wednesday, October 7th (18+)
San Fran, Wellington NZ*
*I Promised the World not performing
Thursday, October 8th (18+)
Powerstation, Auckland NZ*
*I Promised the World not performing
