If you’re a millennial who ever went through a Hot Topic phase as a teen, we’d wager a strong bet you probably owned a few AFI CDS, and perhaps even had one of their gothic, macabre inspired posters on your wall. But, if you simply remember the west coast punks for their early ’00s mainstream breakthrough and never dug much deeper into their history, you might be surprised to learn that they’d already been making music for more than a decade by then. Formed in 1991 in the small Northern California town of Ukiah while still high schoolers (despite being a band for 34 years, the members of AFI are just turning 50), the group began as a scrappy hardcore punk outfit, getting more serious after high school as they relocated to Berkeley, and linked up with instrumental ’90s punk figures like Rancid’s Tim Armstrong, who worked on their first album, and The Offspring’s Dexter Holland, who signed them to his Nitro Records label.
After modest success for their early work, the group’s current and most consistent lineup was cemented by 1998, and around that time they also shifted from hardcore to more conceptual, horror-inspired punk, finding their first taste of broader attention with 2000 fifth album, The Art of Drowning. Arriving just as the alt rock and nu metal of the Y2K era gave way to a new era of pop punk and emo, which would dominate the mainstream throughout the ’00s, AFI (short for A Fire Inside) inked a major label deal ahead of 2003’s Sing the Sorrow, which, with its more pop accessible and emo infused post-hardcore, the goth, but not too scary goth imagery of both their artwork and the band themselves, and thanks to gigantic singles like “Girl’s Not Grey,” “Silver and Cold,” and “The Leaving Song Pt. II,” primed for radio play and attention from MTV and Fuse, transformed AFI into bona fide starts of the aughts punk scene.
The band would hit a mainstream high with the even more commercial followup, 2006’s Decemberunderground, producing their biggest single ever in “Miss Murder,” and went full on pop rock with 2009’s Crash Love, but, since the 2010s, as they, along with many of their 2000s punk and emo peers, have settled into their role as elder statesmen of the scene as pop punk as a whole has receded from its mainstream domination, AFI have gravitated back to their roots, making more interesting and creative choices over the last decade and a half. 2013’s Burials was a bit of a goth reinvention, 2017’s eponymous AFI leaned into the new wave and post-punk influences they’ve always harbored, and 2021’s Bodies continued that sound with a bit more punk bite. With their latest, recently released twelfth album Silver Bleeds the Black Sun…, AFI stick with the adult goth and post-punk sound of recent years, with even more confidence and focus than ever, landing as, perhaps, the strongest records in years.
Few bands have managed to continue on for so many years while making music that gracefully grew and matured with them, but AFI- from their hardcore to horror to mainstream emo punk to their middle aged embrace of new wave, goth rock, and post-punk- have done so spectacularly. The rockers have continued to tour regularly, and have played some fantastic shows in Nashville over the years. For their latest, AFI return to Marathon Music Works tonight, Oct. 18, along with Canadian electronic artist TR/ST. Whether you’re a newcomer, a longtime fan, or you haven’t thought about them since high school, AFI remain one of the coolest, most enduring, and gracefully aged artists in their scene, and tickets for this sure-to-be-excellent performance are available here!
AFI and TR/ST perform tonight, Oct. 18 at Marathon Music Works. The show is all ages, begins at 8 p.m. (doors at 7 p.m.), and tickets are available for $47.10.
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