Back in 2022, metalcore legends Every Time I Die went through a highly publicized split, and the band members branched off into their own musical projects. Jordan Buckley, Stephen Micciche and Clayton “Goose” Holyoak went on to form Better Lovers, and singer Keith Buckley started up Many Eyes.
Guitarist Andy Williams, who wrestles as “The Butcher” for AEW and on the independent wrestling scene, had a standing invite to join Better Lovers but revealed in a new interview with Web Is Jericho via Youngstown Studio that he had something else in mind.
“When (ETID) broke up, Better Lovers had started out of that,” Williams said. “I think that was the first band out of all the three bands that came out of ETID. I was kind of entertaining the idea of doing that with those guys. We had a couple practices, and it was fine, but just like, I think it was more like the slate is clean, and I wanted to do something different. I just didn’t know what I wanted to do.”
Williams said he put his focus on wrestling at the time, but admitted he still felt a little jaded about the whole situation. “You have this relationship of almost 30 years doing this thing where that’s what my main focus was creatively,” he explained. “I didn’t play guitar for like two years. I did those Better Lovers practices, and then after that I just kind of like was, ‘I’m gonna focus on wrestling, and when the guitar speaks to me, it’ll speak to me.’”
To get back into the groove of music, Williams initially started strumming his girlfriend’s acoustic guitar looking for inspiration. It eventually struck. He was soon writing new riffs and parts which he later took to the electric guitar to become the basis of the sound of his new band, Atomic Rule.
“The music is really for a journey,” he said. “It’s not for people who want to hear like a 2-minute song. We want to put you in a place where it’s, ‘Oh man, that’s heavy,’ but then like two seconds later, it’s like we’ll hit you with a pretty part or a jazzy part. It’s music for us, but we hope people like it.”
Talking more specifically about the Atomic Rule sound, Williams said he turned to a specific guitar tuning that he used for select songs with Every Time I Die. “We had a few songs in this tuning,” he said. “So the tuning I’m doing is like a little weird. It’s like a low A but with standard tuning . So you get this low, droney note over everything, but you still get all the pretty stuff of a higher tuning. ETID had a couple songs … there was a song called ‘Indian Giver,’ and on the last record there was like four or five songs in this low A tuning. My ear just likes hearing that. So once I kind of picked it up, I was like how can I use that low note more and still give people something to listen to. I like to say it’s like King Crimson in 2026.”
Check out Williams’ full interview discussing Atomic Rule, where he’s currently at in his wrestling career and much more.
