The creation myth of August Burns Red is charmingly pastoral. The founding members, then high school buddies, got together on drummer Matt Greiner's family farmland in exurban Lancaster, Pennsylvania. But the sound they came up with was the opposite of mellow — in fact, maybe all that open space encouraged the response. From the beginning, the group, now a five-piece, went unabashedly after a high-octane metalcore sound influenced by early-'00s subgenre pioneers like Hopesfall. Like many other groups of that scene that began in that time, the band was also powered by a healthy dose of Christian faith. The combination of the two approaches has made the group especially popular with a growing segment of American youth, and the band's most recent album, last year's Leveler, topped both the Christian and hard rock Billboard charts.