Brandon Saller did not think Atreyu were coming back. Asked at the Aftershock festival in Sacramento whether the band's 2011 break was really a hiatus, in an interview with Baby Huey and Chasta of the San Francisco station 107.7 The Bone transcribed by Blabbermouth, the singer said the question had different answers inside the band and that his own was no.
"If I'm being honest, I didn't think it was. I didn't know if we would come back," he said. "The last show we played, I got off stage, fricking bawled my eyes out and my wife scurried me into my car and I left. 'Cause at that time I was, like, 'This is it.'"
The band returned in 2014 and he now argues for the break. "We're lucky enough to do this for a living, and you're lucky enough to have people spend their hard-earned money to like come to your shows, buy your merch, listen to your music," he said. "And I think when you start to maybe sort of lose a little bit of that sparkle of how wonderful this is, you can sniff it out. And I don't think we wanted to get to a point where we're just up there going through the motions and uninspired. And I don't want that to show, because then you're tarnishing whatever you've built."
The three years were not empty. He started Hell Or Highwater, and that band's drummer now plays drums in Atreyu. "Everything happens for a reason," he said. "Our band has gone through different phases of life where we've kind of gotten to really like re-fall in love with this." Atreyu are nearly thirty years old, their tenth album The End Is Not the End came out in April through Spinefarm, and Saller, who used to drum and share the vocals, now only sings.