From Ashes To New

A bedroom rapper from Elizabethtown

The band exists because Matt Brandyberry could not find anyone in Lancaster County who wanted to hear him rap. Raised on a Christian-music-only household listening policy, he found Bone Thugs-n-Harmony at twelve and was recording his own verses on a home computer by fifteen. The response from around him, as he has told local press, was to give it up. He picked up a guitar instead and played in area bands, including the metal and post-hardcore outfit Twelve After, before starting From Ashes to New as a recording project in Lancaster in 2013.

Brandyberry is still the only constant. The early years churned through members, and the pivotal reset came in 2017, when drummer Tim D'onofrio and vocalist Chris Musser both left. Mat Madiro, previously of Trivium, took the drum stool, and the clean-vocal job went to Danny Case of Vanity Strikes after an open audition run through fan-submitted videos — an unusually public way to hire a frontman, and the decision that fixed the band's shape. The current line-up is a five-piece; rhythm guitarist and bassist Jimmy Bennett joined in 2025.

Five records and a slow climb up the radio charts

The catalogue is consistent to the point of being a house style: Brandyberry's rapped and screamed verses against Case's melodic choruses, with programming, breakdowns and a heavy debt to Linkin Park, Korn and Papa Roach. Day One arrived in 2016, The Future in 2018 — the band's Billboard 200 entry, at No. 163 — followed by Panic in 2020 and Blackout in 2023.

Radio was where the progress was measurable. "Through It All" reached No. 6 on Mainstream Rock, "Crazy" No. 3, "Panic" No. 11, and "Barely Breathing", a collaboration with Against the Current, went to No. 2 in 2024. The breakthrough finally came with "Drag Me", which hit the top of Mainstream Rock Airplay on the tally dated 16 May 2026, the band's first No. 1 after a long run of charting singles. It landed in the same week their label, Better Noise, also topped the Alternative Airplay chart with Yellowcard.

That the first chart-topper arrived in the band's thirteenth year, on the back of a single released the previous December, is the most honest summary of how they got here: no viral moment, a lot of touring, and a slow accumulation of radio adds.

Reflections, and the demos that went in the bin

Reflections was released on 17 April 2026 through Better Noise Music, twelve tracks across just over forty minutes, produced by the band with Jon Lundin. It came out of a false start: the group finished sixteen demos in late 2023 and scrapped nearly all of them, keeping two. Brandyberry has described the resulting brief as taking what the band already does and pushing it further rather than reinventing it.

The singles were rolled out over nine months — "New Disease" on 24 July 2025, "Drag Me" on 4 December 2025, "Villain" on 29 January 2026, "Die for You" on 5 March 2026 and "Forever" the day before release. "Villain" was written from the perspective of the person causing the damage in a relationship, a switch from the band's usual position as the wounded party. New Noise Magazine's read of the record centred on mental health and imagery of heaven and hell, and noted Brandyberry taking a rare lead singing turn on "Die for You".

Reviews split hard. Blabbermouth heard twelve songs brimming with more confidence and power than before. Distorted Sound's Colin Jones gave it 4/10 and called it factory-produced hard rock, praising Case's vocals and the hooks on "Darkside" and "Upside Down" while dismissing the rapped lyrics as eye-rolling and the riffs as buried under compression. His verdict — nothing criminal, but we can do better — is roughly where the critical consensus on the band has sat for years, and has had no obvious effect on ticket sales. The album reached No. 29 on the UK Albums Downloads chart.

A support band with a headliner's diary

The touring year has been relentless and deliberately split between rooms of very different sizes. April 2026 was a headline run through Europe and the UK with Comastatic opening, including Berlin, Hamburg and Cologne. Six days after the album came out, the band joined Black Veil Brides across North America from 25 April to 30 May, with TX2 and As December Falls also on the bill, on a run that ran to roughly two dozen dates from Southern California to Massachusetts.

The summer moved them into arenas as the opening act on Shinedown's Dance, Kid, Dance Act II tour alongside Coheed and Cambria — 17 July at Mohegan Sun Arena in Uncasville, Albany the next night, then a western leg through Tucson, Las Vegas, Boise and Spokane in early August. Canada followed with Pacific Coliseum in Vancouver on 15 August and Rogers Place in Edmonton on 17 August, then the Fargodome on 20 August, Treasure Island Amphitheater in Welch, Minnesota on 21 August and the grandstand at the Illinois State Fair in Springfield on 23 August.

They play the Reverb Stage at Louder Than Life in Louisville on 17 September. October brings their first headline tour of Australia, with Banks Arcade supporting: the Factory Theatre in Sydney on 9 October, 170 Russell in Melbourne on 11 October, Lion Arts Factory in Adelaide on 13 October and the Triffid in Brisbane on 15 October. A hometown-adjacent date in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania is booked for 12 December.

Two different shows, depending on the ticket

The headline set and the arena set are not the same band's evening. In Cologne on 11 April, at the Live Music Hall, the show ran from 20:30 to 21:40 — seventeen songs in about seventy minutes, bookended by tape: the Backstreet Boys' "Everybody" as the walk-on and Creed's "Higher" as the send-off, both played straight rather than as a joke. The set drew from all five albums, opening with "New Disease" and running through "Nightmare", "Heartache", "Drag Me", "Monster in Me", "Scars That I'm Hiding", "Hate Me Too", "My Name", "Barely Breathing", "Villain", "Dead to Me", "Nothing", "Through It All" and "Die for You" before closing on "Panic". Four Reflections songs were in the set a week before the album existed.

On the Shinedown arena bill the same material is cut to the bone. At Mohegan Sun on 17 July the band had a flat thirty minutes and used it on seven songs — "New Disease", "Nightmare", "Heartache", "Drag Me", "Barely Breathing", "Die for You" and "Panic" — a run of singles with the deep cuts and the covers stripped out, on stage at 7pm to a room still filling for a 9:05 headliner.

The constant across both is the two-vocalist division of labour: Brandyberry handling the rapped and screamed sections and the programming, Case carrying the choruses. It is the arrangement critics have spent five albums complaining about and the one that has filled the band's calendar from April through December.