As I Lay Dying Bounce Back to Life As Wovenwar Without Their Incarcerated Frontman

Tim Lambesis was once the lead singer of San Diego metalcore band As I Lay Dying. But these days, he’s better known as inmate No. AU0886. In May, the 33-year-old musician was sentenced to six years in prison for admitting to charges that he’d tried to hire a hitman to murder his estranged wife. Now, he’s locked up in the Sierra Conservation Center, a correctional facility in Northern California, his heavy-metal career and personal life in ruins.

As for his ex-bandmates? In the immortal words of Boyz II Men, they’re doin’ just fine.

In the months since Lambesis’ dramatic sentencing hearing, guitarists Phil Sgrosso and Nick Hipa, bassist/vocalist Josh Gilbert and drummer Jordan Mancino have introduced the world to a new band, Wovenwar. They’ve got a new singer, Shane Blay (who actually sings, and also plays guitar), and in July they embarked on a maiden U.S. tour in support of their new, self-titled album, which came out via Metal Blade Records on August 5 and recently reached No. 36 on the Billboard 200 charts.

On top of that, Hipa, Mancino, Sgrosso and his wife Shannon are also now the owners of a San Diego nightclub called Brick by Brick. On a Friday night in August, about 250 friends and family showed up there for an after-party to celebrate the band’s debut hometown show, which went down earlier that evening at a local all-ages club.

“I’m on a cloud right now,” Sgrosso tells me on the night of the party, sitting in the back office of Brick by Brick as the Wovenwar album blares over the PA in the next room. “I just played my favorite show I’ve ever played. I’m excited to do music with these guys.” He takes a sip from a Miller Lite wrapped in a Brick by Brick beer koozie. “This is what I feel like how a band should work.”

The past year has been rough for these guys. Lambesis’ case sent shockwaves through the metal community and drew national media attention, with many outlets seizing on Lambesis’ professed Christianity as a juicy news hook. The ordeal hit his former bandmates extra-hard, both personally and professionally. As I Lay Dying (which is currently on “hiatus,” with Lambesis and Mancino the only remaining “official” members) was once a staple of the international touring circuit. Now, Wovenwar is back at square one. They’ve slept on floors between tour stops, struggled with RV breakdowns, and they’re crossing their fingers for success.

Of course, there’s no promise they’ll achieve past glories. Even still, the guys seem totally stoked about their current situation. Their new album is like an overstuffed turducken, bursting with ideas that they were never able to explore within As I Lay Dying’s rigid metalcore formula: Maiden-y guitar leads, dreamy Deftones-esque textures, clean vocal harmonies and major-key melodies.

“We put everything that we’ve experienced over the past year into songs, into music,” Hipa says, beaming with a boyish smile at Brick by Brick. “To have it come to life, and have people accept it and be into it, it means the world to us.”

Though the band seems eager to distance itself from Lambesis, it’s hard to hear Wovenwar’s music without the backstory creeping in. The band’s name comes from the idea that humans are born innocent, but grow up facing common threads of struggle between love and hate, right and wrong—an obvious allusion to Lambesis’ downfall. The album’s lead single, “All Rise,” is a bombastic anthem to rebirth and rejuvenation, with Blay’s soaring melodies standing in direct defiance of Lambesis’ growly, aggro vocal style.

In an hour-long interview with Noisey, Sgrosso, 28—rocking long dark hair and an Obey T-shirt—is mostly diplomatic when speaking about his former bandmate. But clearly, he’s relieved that Lambesis is out of the picture. He says As I Lay Dying’s ordeal, horrible as it was, came with a “silver lining,” freeing the rest of the band to start fresh.

“It seemed like there needed to be some sort of change at some point. Things were getting a little stale with the band,” Sgrosso says. “We were so locked into our sound, and it was always, like, ‘Man, if we could just go 50 percent with this idea. One hundred percent is too far outside our range. If we could just go half of this idea, it would be awesome… Oh, but we have screaming.’ At the end of the day, you’re like, ‘Oh, cool, I get five percent of that idea.’”

Sgrosso’s relief doesn’t just have to do with aesthetics, though. In the months leading up to Lambesis’ arrest, he says it was obvious that Lambesis was on the verge of snapping. The singer was pumped up on steroids, going through a divorce, itching for a physical altercation. When Sgrosso finally got the news—on the first day of his long-awaited honeymoon with Shannon, the two waking up in a beautiful overwater bungalow along the Sepang coastline in Malaysia—he assumed Lambesis had simply gone out and punched a dude.

“We all just kind of expected he got into a fight. But then it was like, ‘Oh, no, attempted murder. He tried to kill Meggan,’” he says, referring to Meggan Murphy, Lambesis’ ex-wife and a close friend of the Sgrossos. “Your jaw drops to the floor. You just really can’t believe. But you’re so thankful that he got caught, Meggan’s OK. And you think about the kids, and you’re just, like, ‘Is everyone OK?’ At this point, I don’t care about Tim. The kids and Meggan are OK.”

According to Sgrosso, it only took him and his fellow bandmates about a month to decide they were moving on without Lambesis. Metal Blade was committed to keep working with them, and so was their management. All they needed was a new singer—an actual singer this time, not a screamer like Lambesis—and they found one in Blay, an old buddy of Hipa’s who plays in a Fort Worth, Texas metalcore outfit called Oh, Sleeper.

“Finding someone like Shane, it was like, everything that all of us could’ve ever wanted. There was no one else in the world,” Sgrosso says. “We respect him as a writer, as a singer, as a guitar player, and it was the perfect match from the get-go.”

For a brand-new band, Wovenwar is doing pretty well so far. Brian Slagel, the founder and CEO of Metal Blade, says album sales are better than expected. The record has hit No. 1 on the iTunes download charts in the metal category in the U.S., Canada, Germany, the U.K. and Australia, and the band is also getting plenty of tour offers for 2014 and 2015. In September, they’re heading off to Europe for six weeks with In Flames.

“Obviously everything’s tentative and nothing’s set in stone, but they’ll be booked pretty much touring all of next year,” Slagel says. “Those guys have made a lot of friends with a lot of bands over the years, and I think a lot of people are rooting for them.”

Unsurprisingly, it seems Lambesis might be resentful of the new arrangement. In an exclusive, six-page interview with Alternative Press posted online on the day of his sentencing, the frontman accused his former bandmates of using him as their “meal ticket” while playing in As I Lay Dying, and cutting him off after his arrest—claims that Hipa dismissed as “absolute slander” in a statement he posted on his Facebook page in response to the interview.

In the Q&A, Lambesis also seemed eager to spread the blame and fire some shots. In one part of the interview—in which he infamously revealed that he’d pretended to be Christian in order to keep taking money from religious fans, even after straying from the faith—he claimed that only “maybe one in 10” Christian bands he’d toured with were actually Christian, and that a couple of his bandmates had also fallen out of the faith during As I Lay Dying’s run but still opted to play lucrative Christian festival gigs.

When I bring the interview up with Sgrosso, he rolls his eyes, dismissing it as “a bunch of bullshit.”

“Tim has no right to group us into anything that he says. That’s Tim. That’s his approach. Because there were members of the band who stated many times, ‘We don’t feel sincere,’” Sgrosso says, noting that he and other members had publicly acknowledged that they’d grown out of their Christian faith and that they’d felt uncomfortable playing religious gigs. “He’s trying to take us down with him. That’s the thing. He’s just trying to paint things for himself in a better light. And, you know, I think it’s obvious to a lot of people what he was trying to do.”

Undaunted, they’re pressing forward. On the night of the Brick by Brick party, they played their debut San Diego show at SOMA, a popular venue for metalcore and screamo bands. But instead of playing to 2,000 kids or more on the “main stage”— As I Lay Dying’s usual stomping grounds—the quintet was booked for the much smaller “side stage,” where the lighting was low-budget, the foam soundproofing was peeling off the walls, and the turnout was good but far from sold out.

Whatever. The band still had a blast. Sgrosso and Hipa offered up high-flying guitar solos. Blay and Gilbert belted out melodramatic dueling melodies. Mancino, rocking Victorian mutton-chops, brought the muscle with his crashing beats and cascading fills. By the time Wovenwar played their final song, “Prophets”—opening on an acoustic passage before launching into a triumphant, thrash-y riff—people in the audience were clapping over-head to the 4/4 beat, rockin’ out as if they were at a Styx concert.

There’s no point in speculating about Wovenwar’s future: As the fate of their previous band makes clear, the music business is full of unexpected pitfalls. If these guys can get enough people clapping in unison at their live shows, though, the road ahead could be a prosperous one indeed.

Peter Holslin is a music journalist living in LA. He’s on Twitter - @peterholslin.

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