Earlier this year, former Every Time I Die guitarist Andy Williams, who also wrestles as The Butcher in All Elite Wrestling, teased that his new band, Atomic Rule, was working on their debut album. Three bands have emerged from the ashes of Every Time I Die following their highly-publicized split a few years ago — Williams has Atomic Rule; Jordan Buckley, Stephen Micciche, and Clayton “Goose” Holyoak have Better Lovers; and Keith Buckley went on to form Many Eyes.
Atomic Rule made their live debut on Dec. 14 in Buffalo, New York as part of BLissmas ’24, which was headlined by Better Lovers. Video footage of their performance can be viewed below.
Atomic Rule features Williams on guitar, bassist Travis Bennington and drummer Christopher Maggio.
A few years back, Williams explained to Metal Hammer how pro wrestling is like writing a rock song. “I don’t know how to read music,” he explained. “I just picked up a guitar and it just made sense. To me, it was more like Tetris than anything. I would just make these shapes up in my head and I would play these shapes. If I wrote out music, it would only make sense to me and the dudes I was in the band with. A lot of it is like X’s and O’s, or I’ll use squares for certain things and triangles for certain things. It really turned into more of, like, a video game to me than making music.”
He continued: “Wrestling, to me, is like writing a song,” he says. “Once I kind of understood how to write that ‘song’, it was like, ‘Oh, ok, that’s cool – there’s an intro, there’s an outro, there’s a chorus.’ It really does work like that.”
