On November 28, Long Island icons Stray From The Path will go their separate ways. On a raucous night in Berlin for this world-exclusive final interview, we talk to the band about why now is the time to call it quits, which memories will live longest, and what the lasting legacy will be from one of heavy music’s most powerful bands…
Do not go gentle into that good night. Do not go down without a fight. After 20 years at the perilous, political cutting-edge of heavy music, Stray From The Path may be calling it a day, but they’re waving off at their fiery height. Seeing a tiled backdrop of Jack Nicholson in The Shining – his iconic Kubrick Stare shaded in the style of Andy Warhol – being raised above the stage of Berlin’s 800-cap Columbia Theatre, it’s impossible not to feel the bristling thrill or a chaotic culmination about to unfold. We’re 4,000 miles from where it all began in Long Island, New York, but as punters file into the venue twitching with nervous energy, the boys are bringing it home.
“When no-one gave a fuck about Stray, Europe did,” grins keystone guitarist Tom Williams with bittersweet pride. “It was important to us to give back to them one last time. To be successful in a band, you have to start out as kind of an idiot. You have to be willing to go places and hope for the best. It just so happened that worked for us here. So this is where it ends. We’ve been very transparent. When we’ve been counting down how many shows we have left, we mean it.”
Eighteen engagements are still in the diary at the start of the evening. By the time this story is published, only eight will remain. Rather than being in a vehicle hurtling towards its final destination, though, the vibe backstage is one without pressure. Discussing potential photoshoot locations, it transpires Tom isn’t familiar with the visual of David Hasselhoff performing atop the Berlin Wall. Drummer Craig Reynolds, meanwhile, shoots down one particular dressing room backdrop because it looks “a little too much like a podcast – and I love podcasts...”
The running joke that bassist Anthony ‘Dragon Neck’ Altamura, a veteran of 15 years, is ‘just filling in’ seems set to play out to the bitter end. And when asked whether any tears have been shed so far, frontman Andrew ‘Drew York’ Dijorio half-jokes that it’s very much the opposite.
“We’ve been doing this for 20 years,” he shrugs. “Through this band, we’ve given the world everything we can give. I’d rather go out on a high with a victory lap and a new record than [slowly lose momentum]. Looking out the window on the bus some days, I’ll think to myself, ‘Damn, this is the last time we get to do this.’ Then you turn up to certain venues to find there’s no heating, the shower is freezing, there’s a hole in the ground to take a shit in and be like, ‘God, I can’t wait to not do this anymore.’ I’ll go to the merch table and meet fans who seem to want there to be some bitterness. I have to steer the conversation, like, ‘Nah, it’s alright. We’re not here to be sad, we’re here to celebrate!’ We just don’t want to be in this band anymore. But we do want to enjoy these last shows, to see them a positive way where the close of one chapter is the beginning of another.”
Understandably, each individual has a subtly different view of how they reached the end of the line. Founding member and de facto bandleader Tom felt the twinge on a 20th anniversary trip with his wife at the beginning of May: years of being away from his young family and managing rising stars like Counterparts, Dying Wish and LANDMVRKS while out on tour himself was taking its exhausting toll. The band had already discussed that surprise-released album Clockworked might be their last, but the decision to draw a more definite line came on a conference call about the album schedule.
“We just got to the point where it was like, ‘Do we just break up?’” Neck remembers with relief rather than rancour. “‘Is it cooler if we do it on our own terms now rather than waiting for the implosion?’ We’re all good friends who love each other, but it gets harder to be in line with each other after 15 or 20 years of constantly doing that. Everyone has other things in their lives, other things they want to achieve. I’m happy with how it’s gone. As Drew says onstage every night: it’s punk!”
“I like the idea of getting out of the way and passing the torch”
Indeed, aside from Tom’s commitments, Drew has thrown himself into Muay Thai and recently opened his One Stop photo and recording studios in Long Island, Neck is making a name for himself as a filmmaker – shooting for bands like Better Lovers and Fit For An Autopsy, with a metal-themed horror feature film in the works – and Craig’s Downbeat brand continues to go from strength to strength.
“With a band this size you need to be putting your full momentum into it,” the drummer stresses. “It’s six months out of the year touring if you really want to make a go of it. We’re getting old. None of us really have that in us anymore. And you begin to think, ‘Is this a sustainable route for me to be able to retire?’ Like, people ask why we aren’t playing more shows in America. Selfishly, we play our best shows in Europe, and we wanted to go out on the best tour we’ve ever had! But also, we sell half as many tickets in the U.S. as we do in Europe. And if we did a full tour, you’d have to tell Tom that he’s going to miss his kid’s birthday. Drew will miss recording an album. Neck’s gonna miss making a video. And I’ll miss a podcast guest. After all that, you’d come home from the three weeks of being gone with less money than you would’ve made if you’d stayed at home!”
“Also, there are just too many bands now,” Tom casts his eye around tonight’s bustling venue. “I like the idea of getting out of the way and passing the torch. Touring Australia, we brought out [Nashville’s] Orthodox and [Stray-indebted NSW firestarters] Diamond Construct. On this run, we’ve got Calva Louise, Graphic Nature and Alpha Wolf. It’s getting harder and harder nowadays, so let’s make room for bands like those. I like the thought of making way for the next generation!”
Frustration is the curse of political bands. From The Clash to Crosby Stills & Nash, N.W.A. to Rage Against The Machine, none have bowed out because the job was done. Formed amidst the jingoism and xenophobia of post-9/11 New York, SFTP have burned against racism and economic inequality, police brutality and the insidious rise of the far-right. Berlin’s storied history ensures First World Problem Child and Fortune Teller are deafeningly sung back tonight. But with modern American politics at arguably their lowest ebb, are there mixed emotions at ending here and now?
“When you say it like that, it kinda sucks,” smiles Craig, wryly. “But as much as I understand that the world needs music like this right now, it takes a lot to actually make it. It’s draining to write about [and endlessly revisit] all the things you hate. I thought people had a chance for a real revolution. We had Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders. Then the pandemic seemed to be the once-in-our-lifetime [event] where things could genuinely change for good. But now we’ve got Trump again and you get the feeling [they're] keep winning and there’s nothing we can do. That is how fucked the world is at this point: even the artists who speak up against all this stuff are cooked.”
Right from 2008’s first album Villains (pre-Drew, 2003’s Audio Prozac and 2005’s Our Oceania don’t count) it’s been possible to chart Stray’s ideological ebb and flow. Over their last three releases, you can see the crash into fatalism. Recorded in the wake of working on the ground with Hardcore Help Foundation and Actions Not Words to bring clean water to 100 families in the villages outside Nairobi, 2019’s Internal Atomics was the most optimistic output of their career. But written in isolation over a year of lockdown, 2022’s Euthanasia – a record Tom regards as the band’s “masterpiece” – found that hope shattered with 10 songs compellingly calling for the mercy-killing of much of mankind. Hammered out instrumentally in the space of a week, Clockworked buzzed with indignation and disbelief at the emergence of new horrors every passing day – its title and artwork a downcast acknowledgement that ‘the only way to win is not to play’.
“No one band is ever going to change the world,” sighs Drew. “I’m just happy to have spoken out on the things that are important to us: injustice, [corrupt] politicians, or singers signing bombs that are going to be dropped on people in ‘a war’. I don’t want to say that I’m checked out of it, but I’ve done enough. We’ve done enough.”
“Things happen sometimes and people will ask, ‘Where are Stray talking about this?!’” Neck cuts in. “They forget that we’re busting our asses to write songs about these things – songs that might help people to think differently than they would reading a comment on some online argument. I think the songs we’ve written will live on – a lot longer than some Instagram story!”
“The Battle Of Los Angeles is as relevant in 2025 as it was in 2000,” nods Tom. “The Shape Of Punk To Come is as applicable now as it was in 1997. Rage Against The Machine have been one of the most influential bands of my life. They made three albums. We did nine. In 1996, on Bulls On Parade, Zack de la Rocha sang, ‘Weapons not food, not homes, not shoes / Not need, just feed the war cannibal animal.’ That’s still relevant today. As Drew tells the fans: ‘Our music isn’t going anywhere. You’ll always have us.’ Maybe it’s greedy to hope that in 10 years people will still be listening to music we made. But we wrote our hearts out, we worked our asses off, we sacrificed a lot, and we believe that lyrics like ‘Desperate people never stay desperate forever’ from Guillotine will be relevant. In another decade, people will still be saying ‘Fuck the cops!’ like we did on III.”
“The songs we’ve written will live on a lot longer than some Instagram story”
Teenagers in the early-2000s, when bands like Rage, System Of A Down and Green Day were chart-topping sensations, the members of Stray struggle with the idea that their departure leaves a hole in heavy music that will be difficult to fill. Friends and contemporaries like Enter Shikari, Stick To Your Guns and Rise Against will doubtless maintain the righteous discourse. And Tom finds hope in the rise of newer artists like Dying Wish and Fontaines D.C. But will anyone deliver the message with the same blunt force and infectious catchiness as Stray?
“We’re just extremely literal,” Tom reasons of their blue-collar appeal. “We’re not booksmart. We just write the way that we talk. We say, ‘Fuck this dude!’ So what are the lyrics? Exactly that! That’s where you get, ‘May god have mercy on you – I won’t!’ Is there anyone doing the same right now? Maybe not. But they’ll come. And when they do, I’ll fire up the band’s social media to push them!”
Regrets? Stray have unsurprisingly few. Tom wishes they’d gotten to play London’s O2 Academy Brixton or to share a stage with Deftones just once. Neck, meanwhile, warns of the dangers of dropping acid right before a show. Tellingly, most of the missed chances that cloy at them are those where they could’ve gone harder for causes they believe in. This year’s sledgehammer Fuck Them All To Hell, for instance, was originally planned for election day in 2024, but they backed off because of the of legitimately progressive, but unsuccessful, Democratic vice-presidential nominee Tim Walz.
More famously, banging 2017 single Goodnight Alt-Right was allowed to be consumed by the dog pile of death threats and criticism from both left and right that whipped up around it. Still prickling from criticism from the left, Craig wishes they’d gone ahead with using a tweet criticising the song from far-right commentator Richard Spencer as a live backdrop. Tom, meanwhile, stresses lessons learned about the importance of not being intimidated onto the back foot.
“It was tough,” he shakes his head. “If one person tells you they’re gonna kill you, you can shrug it off. But if 30,000 people do, you start to believe it. All the while, you’re actively promoting when and where you’ll be at a certain place. I don’t think many people would have handled that as well as we did, but I still I wish I knew then what I know now: there’s no bigger coward than a Nazi!”
On September 28, Stray From The Path played their final New York show at Manhattan’s Irving Plaza. For Drew, it was a poignant full-circle moment. Having skipped school countless times to take his skateboard and go watch bands like Strung Out, Lagwagon and NOFX take a bite out of the Big Apple in that room, catching the train again and walking the long walk for his own headline show was a trippy experience that reconnected him with the mindset with which Stray first began.
“At school, they’d send you to the guidance counsellor to figure out what you wanted to do when you got older,” he shuffles back the memories. “I never set foot in that office. Making music was all I wanted to do. There was nobody in the world who was going to tell me any different. It just so happened that Tom was as crazy as I was. When I think back to those days, I think of us in a van with a binder full of MapQuest directions, no internet, no social media, not knowing if we’d have enough gas money to get to the next city, having to do heinous shit just to get there. Making Villains, we were putting our own money in, sleeping in our van to save. I us remember spending $10 on superhero blankets just to stay warm. But we were young and this was all that mattered.”
Those hard-bitten young men wouldn’t believe the scenes in Germany tonight, as hundreds of fans rock the theatre to its foundations. Even the less so the train of memories leading to this goodbye.
Being ‘discovered’ by Suffocation guitarist Terrance Hobbs and crashing in his apartment while they found their feet. Recording with musical godfather Kurt Ballou. Rubbing shoulders with childhood heroes like Tom Morello. Recording a BBC live session at London’s famous Maida Vale studios, and being told, ‘You know who was here yesterday? Coldplay!’ Getting to headline the capital’s 3,300-cap Roundhouse. Playing in Africa. Thrilling tens of thousands of fans at shows like Download 2023 – a photo from which hangs proudly in Drew’s chiropractor’s office back home.
“This is everything I ever wanted to do,” nods Craig. “It’s everything I dreamed of as a kid.”
Through colder, adult eyes, however, one has to ask whether Stray ever really got their dues?
From noble subject matter to a one-of-a-kind sound that welded Drew’s rap-rock swagger to a metallic foundation owing to everyone from Gojira to Pig Destroyer, they are a truly special band. So with contemporaries like Turnstile, Knocked Loose and Architects pushing into the world’s biggest rooms, is there regret at never tasting real superstardom? Or was that never Stray’s path?
“Some bands appeal to everybody,” Tom replies. “We certainly don’t. And we never wanted to. No-one just likes Stray. People love us or hate us. We were never meant to appeal to the masses. I write what I like, not to appeal to any specific audience. What we’re talking about can divide people. The music is weird. Drew’s voice is non-traditional. We’ll never be ‘that band on the radio’. Should we have been bigger? Maybe. I get that chip on my shoulder. Everything we did, we earned. Nothing was handed to us. We always had to convince people. At the same time, we’ve built so much from nothing. We’re playing almost 2,000 people in Cologne. And 2,300 in London!”
“At the end of the day, we can have no complaints,” agrees Neck. “We took it further than we ever thought we would. Stray will always be ‘my band’ and I’ll always be proud of what we achieved.”
“We’ve suffered from being a little ahead of the political conversation,” reckons Craig. “We suffer from being ahead of the news rather than on the back of it. It happened with Goodnight Alt-Right. It happened again when we had Shot Caller written and printed two weeks before [the Luigi Mangione shooting]. When things happen, other bands will dip their toes, waiting for the reaction. Then they write about it. We wrote about stuff before it happens rather than after. What would I like our lasting legacy to be? For people to say that, ‘Stray was right!’ Because, so often, we were.”
“We’ve suffered from being a little ahead of the political conversation”
On November 28 in Bristol, Stray From The Path will knock it out of the park one last time. No tablets will be inscribed, but those who’ve followed this journey can guess their commandments: be good to each other. Stand up for what you believe in. Say what you want to say. Say it with conviction. Be loud. Be energetic. Have a soul. Unequivocally, they assure us that this is the end in terms of recording and touring. But not as a group of tight-knit friends. Doors remain open for collaborations between members. And they’re candid enough to admit that one-off shows in the future are not entirely off the table if all four of them were willing and able. The future is still unwritten, and nothing is guaranteed. For now, there are only blood, sweat, tears and gratitude.
“I’ve known that we were an underrated band from the beginning,” Drew signs off with a boyish smile. “But I can’t leave this with an ungrateful mindset. I’ve done more in my life than most people will ever get to do. We all have. This tour encompasses all of that. We go back to certain cities and into rooms where we weren’t headlining before and remember how we went out and earned it. Now that hard work is paying off and we’re able to just soak it all in. And this isn’t the end. Every night we meet fans telling us as individuals that we shouldn’t stop making music. So although this band may be over, the experiences and opportunities never are.”
Stray From The Path will play their final shows from November 23 – 28 across the UK.
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