Ten years have passed in the blink of an eye. In May of this year, Architects marked a decade of their magnum opus, All Our Gods Have Abandoned Us. It is a uniquely cruel twist of fate that such a moment came shrouded in the most complicated of emotions. It is impossible, after all, to separate the art from the plight of the artist – one of British metal’s most gifted, visionary sons – so central to its creation. It is impossible, too, to separate it from the Architects story that has followed in the decade since, and the path its success set the band on. It is the record that gave the band the platform to be what it is today, yet it’s the record you wish in many ways they never made at all.
Because with not even three months between its release and Tom’s passing, All Our Gods Have Abandoned Us became an elegy it was never intended to be. Tom’s sickness remained, as it should, a private matter during its recording, release and promotion. Now inextricably heard through the prism of what followed, the album remains a decade on an utterly breathless and breathtaking listen, akin to David Bowie’s Blackstar in the way its creator speaks of his own impending death.
It’s easy to forget, however, that there was a time when it meant, on the face of it at least, something else entirely; a time when All Our Gods… was being discussed in the light of its intensely ferocious creativity, rather than its mournful undertone. It’s a funny thing, how the meaning of music – intended or otherwise – changes through lived experience. There were moments on the record, Dan Searle told me later, that even he failed to understand the true meaning of even as they unfolded in the studio right before his eyes. There was a time I had All Our Gods… on near-daily front-to-back rotation. There was a time it was all so euphoric, so exhilarating, rather than quietly devastating. This band and its music had grown to personally mean so much to me. At the time when they sang of hope being a prison, they gave me hope in a music scene that at the time, for reasons very much of my own, I often felt a dispiriting emotional disconnect from.
Revisiting the album now, for the first time in what once would have seemed an unthinkably long time, Nihilist’s introduction still raises hairs; Deathwish and Downfall still bring a dopamine rush; A Match Made In Heaven still makes me splutter for how good it is. For my money, All Our Gods Have Abandoned Us still wipes the floor with any other metalcore record, British or otherwise, past, present and probably future, full fucking stop, argue amongst yourselves. But it will also never again mean to me quite what it once did. In becoming something else, something greater, on that tragic August day, it also lost something. This was a record, a band, to truly believe in. And when the universe conspires to so cruelly, so unfairly, so mercilessly take its heart, what is left to believe in at all?