I Am

The band’s fifth full-length "I Am" is baffling first and foremost because it’s not meant to be baffling. As guitarist, mastermind and band nucleus Seth Hecox explains, the album is less about reinventing heavy music than it is reinventing Becoming The Archetype. That’s not to say listeners won’t find the band doing its usual mind-warping and genre-bending, but the point of this album wasn’t to transcend the artform of metal music, it was to master it.

“I AM is 100% head banging riffs,” Hecox says. “Gone are the sitars and horns of Celestial Completion. Instead, we've crafted an album full of the heaviest and most technical songs we've ever written.”

Recorded with producer Shane Frisby (Bury Your Dead, The Ghost Inside), "I Am", as the title suggests, is also a statement of an album that puts a new stamp on who Becoming The Archetype is and what it stands for following an inter-band shakeup - one that cleared the path for Hecox to assemble a true dream team of musicians around him.

After seven years and four acclaimed albums with longtime label Solid State Records, BTA is in the unique situation of being an accomplished veteran band with a roster comprised largely of young, hungry, wildly talented musicians poised for their first real test on the national front. It’s a fact that isn’t lost on the band who are embracing this perceived new lease on life as an opportunity to both reinvigorate the band’s wide fan base and tap into a huge cross-section of metal fans who previously might have balked at BTA’s unbridled, manic creativity.