Dark New Day formed in late 2004 under the name Dark Blue, brought together by a group of childhood friends and veteran rock musicians who wanted to try something new outside their established bands. The group featured Brett Hestla of Virgos Merlot, Clint Lowery of Sevendust, Troy McLawhorn of DoubleDrive, Corey Lowery of Stereomud and Stuck Mojo, and Will Hunt of Skrape. After signing with Warner Bros. Records, they began recording their debut album with producer Ben Grosse, whose previous production credits include Filter, Fuel, Sevendust, and Alter Bridge. On January 29, it was announced that the group were changing their name from Dark Blue to Dark New Day, with no reason given for the change. Given the pedigree of its members, the band was quickly regarded as a rock supergroup built for the modern active rock scene.
The band's breakthrough came with the release of its debut album. The band's debut album was released on June 14, 2005, entitled Twelve Year Silence, and its single "Brother" ranked 7th on the US Mainstream Rock chart. The band had already debuted with a track on the soundtrack for the spring 2005 horror film House of Wax before issuing the full-length debut, and tours with acts like Crossfade and Seether followed. The lineup's collective resume, spanning Sevendust, Stereomud, Stuck Mojo, DoubleDrive, and Skrape, gave Dark New Day instant credibility within the hard rock and alternative metal community, and the record established them as a serious act rather than a side project.
The years that followed brought significant lineup turnover and industry complications that shaped the band's arc. Their debut album was followed by the EP Black Porch (Acoustic Sessions) in 2006. In 2008 Clint Lowery left the band to re-join Sevendust, and Troy McLawhorn departed to join Seether, prompting the band to add BC Kochmit from Switched on guitar for touring purposes while singer Brett Hestla also took on rhythm guitar duties. In 2009, following unofficial word that the band had disbanded, Clint Lowery clarified that Warner Bros. had dropped Dark New Day from the label and that new material recorded with producer Dave Bendeth might never see release, complicated further by Warner Brothers owning exclusive rights to some of the tracks. Despite these complications, the band eventually released its shelved material in the fall of 2011 as two simultaneous digital compilation albums, Hail Mary, featuring the Bendeth-produced tracks, and B-Sides, made up mostly of demo recordings. Though still largely inactive as a touring unit, Dark New Day released their second studio album, New Tradition, in 2012, followed by the proper release of Hail Mary on February 19, 2013. Since the flurry of archival releases in the early 2010s, Dark New Day has remained dormant, with its members scattering back into other established projects, including Sevendust, Evanescence, and Eye Empire, among others. The band's brief but intense run left behind a small but respected catalog that is still valued by fans of mid-2000s hard rock and alternative metal for the sheer density of talent involved, and it remains a notable footnote in the history of the era's rock supergroups.
This archive holds a small but meaningful piece of that story. Wayne Dennon photographed Dark New Day on two occasions in 2005, capturing the band during the height of the Twelve Year Silence touring cycle across shows in two different cities in two different states. The 43 photographs from those nights remain among the collection's quieter treasures, viewed 34,363 times by visitors revisiting a band whose supergroup lineup burned bright before fading into the rosters of the bigger names its members came from and later returned to.
