Sound the Alarm

Sound the Alarm is the fifth studio-album by Saves the Day, and released on April 11, 2006, through Vagrant Records. Frontman, Chris Conley, describes Sound the Alarm as a response to the lackluster commercial performance of the band’s 2003 album, In Reverie, in a 2006 interview with Rolling Stone:

This record is about the black clouds inside my mind. It was these intense fears and paranoia and diluted thoughts that were eating me alive. It was utter insanity. […] The album was pronounced dead three days after it came out. I had a total breakdown. I was like, ‘How is this possible? The album just came out!‘”

Shortly after the release of In Reverie, Dreamworks Records was added to Interscope Records, which is owned by Universal Music Group, and the band was subsequently dropped from the label. In the same interview, Conley added:

“I completely lost faith in myself after In Reverie I’ve always second guessed myself and was always self loathing, but when that happened, a chamber got opened up inside me, a vault of seething despair. And there were all these voices. It was swallowing me — I had so many fears. Like, I should just call it quits, and the whole world would be
way better off without me. […] During In Reverie, that was a time during my life when the band continued to have success and things were going great and I didn’t have that much to vent about and then all of a sudden, the shit storm came. And there was plenty of material — just frustration and rage and desperation, just the fear of losing everything. Tons of fuel for the fire. […] The two titles say it all. In Reverie is like you’re in a dream-like state, and Sound the Alarm is ‘wake the fuck up.‘”

This album is the first of a trilogy of albums about self-discovery, where Sound the Alarm is an album with themes “expressing discontent.”