Following a well publicized break up back in 2021, the members of metalcore legends Every Time I Die all branched off into their own projects. Singer Keith Buckley started Many Eyes, while Jordan Buckley, Stephen Micciche and Clayton “Goose” Holyoak went on to form Better Lovers. That left guitarist Andy Williams. He would eventually go on to form a new band Atomic Rule, but it took a little while to get there.
Willams had a standing offer to join Better Lovers and even rehearsed a few times as the group got underway, but the guitarist admitted he needed a bit of a reset after writing, recording and touring for more than two decades with Every Time I Die.
“ETID broke up, and I was just looking for something different,” Williams said. “Better Lovers started out of that. I was kind of entertaining the idea of doing that with those guys. And we had a couple practices, and it was fine. But it was more like, the slate was (now) clean, and I wanted to do something different, I just didn’t know what I wanted to do.”
So for two years, Williams focused on his other passion, professional wrestling. Williams wrestles as The Butcher for both All Elite Wrestling and on the independent wrestling scene. “I just focused on wrestling at that time, and I guess I was a little jaded also. You kind of have this relationship of almost 30 years doing this thing where that’s where my main focus was creatively.” Williams admitted he didn’t play guitar for nearly two years. “I just focused on wrestling, (and thought) ‘When the guitar speaks to me, it’ll speak to me.”
It did end up speaking to him, but not necessarily in the way he envisioned. “I never liked acoustic guitar,” he said. “My girl had an acoustic guitar, and I picked it up one day, and I was like, ‘This is cool.’ I was hearing things a little different. I started just putting some things together. And when I moved it to an electric guitar with an amp, it was, ‘Oh, I’m doing something different here.’ I was acrobatically moving around the guitar. Hours would go by, and I’d put the guitar down and realize, ‘Oh wow, I just played the guitar for two hours.’”
It turns out Williams’ best friend, Eternal Sleep’s Travis Bennington, was going through a very similar situation. “I didn’t know Travis, Atomic Rule’s bass player, was kind of going through the same thing,” Williams said. “Eternal Sleep, his band, had slowed down. He’s my best friend, so we would talk every week about what music we were listening to, not what we were writing. I had no idea he wasn’t writing. He totally put the guitar down. I go, ‘Hey dude, I’ve been writing some stuff, do you want to hear it?’”
Bennington loved Williams’ ideas, and Atomic Rule was off and running. “It just kind of came together that way. Two friends who got a little jaded with what they were doing and had to pivot to see music a little differently.”
Check out Atomic Rule here, and scope Williams’ full Web Is Jericho interview via Youngstown Studio below.
