Flyleaf is one of the most popular bands in Christian rock, but guitarist Sameer Bhattacharya doesn't believe in Christian rock.
"We're all Christians, and we all hold on to our faith very strongly," he says. "Jesus didn't come here for just Christians. He came here for the world, to show everyone that love is real and it's not wrong to speak the truth, and if you speak the truth, you're going to find it.
"To seclude yourself to a subculture, to seclude yourself to a bubble, I think is wrong. I don't agree with the Christian industry. I'd like to see it end, really."
Flyleaf will be performing well outside the bubble of Christian rock Monday night at Rupp Arena, when the Texas band opens for co-headliners Breaking Benjamin and Three Days Grace.
The group is touring in support of its second album, Memento Mori, the long-awaited and critically acclaimed follow-up to Flyleaf's 2005 self-titled debut.
That debut introduced the world to the quintet's heavy, Gothic sound and charismatic frontwoman Lacey Mosley. It turned heads in Christian rock, but the band also hit the road with mainstream acts like Korn, and it was under no pressure to create a follow-up to its first album.
"We know the joke that you have your whole life to write a first record and a few months to write the second," Bhattacharya says. "But for us, that has not been true."
While many labels will pressure an act to crank out a follow-up to a hit debut, Bhattacharya says, Octone Records encouraged them to take their time.
"The debut record was still doing well, the singles were still on the charts and doing well, and we were still touring regularly," Bhattacharya says. "We were ready to record a new album a year and a half after the first one, and we took a few weeks off to write a few songs. The label said let's see how this goes and how far we can take this record."
All the while, Flyleaf kept writing songs, so when it did come time to record Memento Mori, "we had an arsenal of songs," Bhattacharya says.
They even included a few that didn't make it onto the debut, like Tiny Heart. But most of the second album is material written in the past few years and informed by years of touring the country and circumnavigating the globe.
"It is a big world, but it is also a small world, and people are the same from here in the States and Europe to Japan," Bhattacharya says. "They have the same desires and feel the same things."
And that informed the new album.
"We had a broader understanding of what we were trying to do with Memento Mori," Bhattacharya says. "With our debut, we were still growing, and we still are. But we've always had a common theme in our band and our songs that struggles are real. People struggle and people deal with evil things. But there is hope, and you can find that hope if you really try."
That's a message that Bhattacharya says the band thinks it is biblically commanded to take to as wide an audience as possible.
"We're supposed to be a light in the world," he says. "We're supposed to operate in the world. Jesus said if you have a lamp, you don't put it in a corner somewhere. You put it on a lamp stand in the middle of the room."
Monday night, Flyleaf puts its lamp in the spotlight.
