7 on the Billboard Alternative Songs Chart and received radio play across the country. The dark pop-punk track, written after the album was completed, peaked at No. In early January 2003, AFI released "Girl’s Not Grey” - StS's lead single, and the band's first for a major. Havok set pace as the band's frontman, debuting a highly made up look that was a mashup of Danzig, the Cure's Robert Smith and Bauhaus singer Peter Murphy. While AFI had long employed dark themes in their lyrics and music, StS truly embraced the goth and emo aesthetics of the early aughts. Sing The Sorrow was a cohesive, bleak and pulsating 55-minute opus, filled with elements of hardcore, alt-rock, East Bay melodic hardcore, horror punk and alt-rock a la the Cure. ĪFI continued to fuse its sonic past with new interests, creating a highly potent brand of alternative. "It was the first time that I was going to be able to have time to track the vocals in a period that wouldn’t absolutely result in me destroying my voice," Havok told Yahoo. With label support for a proper recording process, AFI had plenty of time to develop Sing The Sorrow, recording the album over six months with producers Jerry Finn and Butch Vig in Los Angeles. The band formed in 1991 and made a name for themselves performing at the historic alt-music venue 924 Gilman Street alongside Jawbreaker, Rancid and Green Day. However, these new peers were still in their infancy AFI had been around for over a decade and were one of the top hardcore/post-punk acts in the San Francisco Bay Area. The timing was fortuitous: Pop-punk and emo acts like Taking Back Sunday, Good Charlotte, A Simple Plan, the Used and My Chemical Romance were thriving in the mainstream. With Nitro's encouragement, the quartet signed with DreamWorks in 2002 and began working on their breakthrough, Sing the Sorrow. But stagnancy had never been an option, and AFI deliberately evolved their sound from one release to the next to create a sprawling body of work that, today, includes 11 albums. Members Davey Havok, Jade Puget, Hunter Burgan and Adam Carson had to decide: Business as usual, or enter the big leagues for the resources that could help their music reach as many people as possible. They could leave the comfort of their long-time indie label Nitro Records for a major label, but what if they lost creative freedom?
Fresh off the success of their beloved fifth album, The Art of Drowning, the band was caught between the indie world and the mainstream. Prolific East Bay punk band AFI was on the cusp of a major shift in their trajectory in 2001.
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