But through the nostalgic haze, there\u2019s also a sense of bubbling rage from hundreds upon hundreds of New Zealanders who can\u2019t find \u2018Crawl\u2019 on any music streaming platforms. \u201cIt is a crime that this song was number 1 on C4 tv for soooo long and its not even on spotty [Spotify]\u201d someone wrote just last year, garnering 320 likes in support. \u201cSucks that spotify doesn\u2019t have this song grrr\u201d has 520 likes, and was written eight years ago. Even the relatively fresh \u201c2025 and still waiting for this track to drop on Spotify!\u201d has already got 77 likes.\u00a0<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
One such aggrieved New Zealander is Justine Sachs, a self-described \u2018Crawl\u2019 superfan. \u201cIt\u2019s just the perfect song,\u201d she says. Not only does Sachs enjoy the \u201ccrazy belter\u201d chorus and the harmonies from Beth Campbell \u2013 \u201cEvanescence couldn\u2019t. Hayley from Paramore couldn\u2019t\u201d \u2013 she also resonated with the social message as a moody teen. \u201cIt\u2019s all about people falling between the cracks, being kept down by the man. It\u2019s like the system is coming down on all of us, and all we need is space to learn to crawl,\u201d she pauses. \u201cNot even walk, man, just crawl.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
The timing was pertinent too. \u201cThis was the height of My Chemical Romance after The Black Parade and Fall Out Boy, but we also had this wave of local bands like Goodnight Nurse, Elemeno P, Goodshirt and Atlas. It felt really special to have our own local version of it.\u201d Watching the music video every afternoon on C4 also helped canonise \u2018Crawl\u2019. \u201cBritomart was such an important spot for me and my friends. When you\u2019re 13, there are not a lot of places you can go to be contemplative and flick your emo fringe around, so we felt really seen.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
But seasons change, fringes grow out, and eventually the world moved on. The futuristic fountain of Britomart, home to \u2018Crawl\u2019 and also \u2018We Gon\u2019 Ride\u2019<\/a> was removed to extend the station, and Sachs similarly turned her back on her roots. \u201cI tried to suppress my emo background and pretend it all never happened,\u201d she says. That was until about a decade later, at Shadows Bar in the University of Auckland, when a few words from \u2018Crawl\u2019 crept back into her mind. Nobody else remembered it, insisting she was thinking of \u2018Crawling\u2019 by Linkin Park<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n Sachs took to Spotify but couldn\u2019t find any evidence of the song, and spent some time wondering if she had made it up. \u201cFor a while I couldn\u2019t even remember it enough to find any evidence of it, but I also knew deep down that a part of me was missing,\u201d she says. After getting into another heated discussion about \u2018Crawl\u2019 at a party, she went home and finally found the music video on YouTube. \u201cIt was a real renaissance moment for me \u2013 I even made a playlist of New Zealand pop punk and emo, but I was so sad because I couldn\u2019t add \u2018Crawl\u2019.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Now, \u201ca few times a year\u201d, Sachs is forced to load up YouTube to play \u2018Crawl\u2019 at parties and other assorted social situations, complete with pre-roll ads. \u201cIt\u2019s not ideal at all, and it\u2019s actually a disservice to a very important song,\u201d she says. \u201cI\u2019m really trying my best to support artists \u2013 I don\u2019t even have Spotify and use Apple Music now \u2013 but I don\u2019t want to get YouTube Premium just for this one song.\u201d Asked if she has a message for Atlas, Sachs is clear: \u201cI want to know why their song isn\u2019t on streaming services, and I also just want to know if they are OK.\u201d<\/p>\n Ben Campbell, founding member of Atlas, is OK. He\u2019s busy, in fact, running a restaurant in Akaroa<\/a>, and doesn\u2019t have quite as much time as I do to dwell in the minutiae of 2007. But after a few days of phone tag, he is more than happy to return to the origins of Atlas. The band formed in the mid-2000s after Campbell had left Zed, and was working in Las Vegas with his sister Beth on a Robert Lamm live DVD. Sean Cunningham, the gravelly-voiced Kentucky boy who would soon be crawling dramatically through Britomart, was hired to be their driver.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cWe got along really well, and one night Sean came back to the hotel room, we got the guitars out, and we had this amazing two-hour session where we wrote three songs,\u201d says Campbell. They decided then and there to start a band together \u2013 working name Tall Poppies \u2013 and brought Sean back to Christchurch to keep making demos. While they stayed independent by setting up their own label structure, the band eventually signed with Warner Music to help with the production and distribution of their first (and only) album, Reasons For Voyaging.\u00a0<\/p>\n As for \u2018Crawl\u2019, Campbell remembers writing it in a flurry in their flat in Addington. They didn\u2019t know initially that it would be their big hit, but Campbell recalls a moment where the whole band were standing in an elevator together and they realised the melody of the song was going through all of their heads simultaneously. \u201cThat\u2019s when I thought, OK, there\u2019s something really catchy here,\u201d he says. The song was released in March 2007, entering the charts at number nine and shooting straight to number one, where it would stay for nearly two months.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cThat first week that it charted at number one, we just absolutely lost it,\u201d says Campbell. \u201cEach week we\u2019d sit there at that same spot at Andy\u2019s flat [Andy Lynch, guitarist for Zed and Atlas] and refresh it. We just could not believe that it would keep coming back at number one. It almost became a joke, it was just amazing.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Next came the music video, which was shot in a single day outside Britomart train station. \u201cIt felt like such a big budget production for us, because all of a sudden, here we were in Auckland\u2019s CBD with full film crews, run sheets, actors,\u201d says Campbell. \u201cIt was a huge level up for us, although I still remember there is that scene with a couple of Japanese school girls with wigs on. At the time I remember thinking, oh those wigs look pretty cheesy, but they must look alright on film. And now every time I watch it, I still go, nope, those wigs just look cheesy.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Cheesy wigs aside, Campbell says \u2018Crawl\u2019 was still a highlight of his career. \u201cZed actually never had a number one single, so for me and Andy, that was a huge thing to tick off \u2013 it just happened to be on a different project,\u201d he laughs. Although their next single \u2018Magic 8\u2019 peaked at number 27 in the charts, Atlas rode the momentum of \u2018Crawl\u2019 into tours with Silverchair and Stereophonics, before getting stuck into their second album. \u201cThe new material was really exciting and strong, we had really matured as a band and we were really ready,\u201d says Campbell.<\/p>\n But when Cunningham returned to the studio to put his signature gravelly vocals down on their new demos, the band knew that something was off. \u201cHe had this kind of ball bearing rattling in his voice,\u201d says Campbell. \u201cThe man\u2019s always had a bit of a growl, but something was really wrong with his voice \u2013 it sounded broken.\u201d They tried resting and repeating over a series of days and weeks, eventually sending him to a top vocal clinic in Nashville for a month. \u201cNobody could get to the bottom of it,\u201d says Campbell. \u201cHis voice just didn\u2019t bounce back.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/p>\n With Cunningham\u2019s voice being such a big part of the band\u2019s identity, they all agreed that there was no point trying to take Atlas any further without him. \u201cIt was really sad, because it felt like we were so ready for the next chapter and we had already invested four or five years into it,\u201d Campbell says. \u201cSo Sean ended up staying in the States, we moved back from Auckland to Christchurch, the quakes hit just a few months later, and that was the end of Atlas.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Campbell stayed involved in the local music scene after the quakes, helping put on live shows on portable stages around the city, before eventually moving into hospitality. Spotify arrived in New Zealand in 2012, Apple Music in 2015, and members of the band have periodically noticed that Atlas\u2019s back catalogue is nowhere to be found on any of the digital streamers. \u201cI believe it\u2019s because the licensing agreement with Warners expired and no one took ownership of the digital onboarding,\u201d says Campbell. \u201cSpotify didn\u2019t exist when Crawl was released, so it has effectively fallen between the cracks.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Making things even more difficult is the fact that nobody knows where the original masters are for the album. \u201cAndy\u2019s going to have a search through his barn and see if there\u2019s a dusty old Atlas box somewhere,\u201d Campbell laughs. In the meantime, they have a high quality ripped version of the CD waiting in the wings to be uploaded, but nobody knows quite how to proceed. \u201cEverything in the industry has changed completely from when I was in it,\u201d says Campbell. \u201cI don\u2019t even know what the process is for setting up an Atlas Spotify account.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Warner Music are yet to respond to The Spinoff\u2019s inquiries about \u2018Crawl\u2019, but Campbell is hopeful they can bring the smash hit of 2007 to streaming platforms soon. \u201cIt\u2019s actually been really motivating for us, because it was a really sad ending for Atlas. We had to just give up the dream and move on, so it\u2019s cool to know that people want to hear it.\u201d Cunningham, whose voice has since recovered, even returned to Christchurch earlier this year and performed an acoustic version of \u2018Crawl\u2019<\/a>. Time for an Atlas reunion, perhaps? \u201cNow, wouldn\u2019t that be fun,\u201d says Campbell.\u00a0<\/p>\n As for reformed emo Sachs, news of a \u2018Crawl\u2019 comeback couldn\u2019t come sooner. \u201cLook, we\u2019re back in an economic depression, and people are feeling just as emo as they were in 2007,\u201d she says.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cWe are back in that moment, we are crawling, and we need Atlas to save us all over again.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Alex Casey goes in search of \u2018Crawl\u2019 by Atlas, the beloved mid-2000s emo anthem that\u2019s \u2018fallen between the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":76505,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[58822,64,63,6212,58823,12571,134,136,7790,53523,2332,5282,2708,58824],"class_list":["post-76504","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-music","tag-atlas","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-comments-enabled","tag-crawl","tag-emo","tag-entertainment","tag-music","tag-nostalgia","tag-nz-music","tag-pop-culture","tag-spotify","tag-streaming","tag-zed"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76504","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=76504"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76504\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/76505"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=76504"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=76504"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=76504"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Justine Sachs in 2007. (Additional design by Alex Casey)<\/p>\n
Atlas at the 2007 Vodafone music awards. (Photo: Sandra Mu\/Getty Images)<\/p>\n
Andy Lynch and Ben Campbell in the \u2018Crawl\u2019 music video. Image: Youtube<\/p>\n