With Roots Above and Branches Below — The Devil Wears Prada

With Roots Above and Branches Below is The Devil Wears Prada's third studio album, released on Ferret Music on May 5, 2009. It runs eleven songs in just over forty minutes, and it's the record that took a Dayton, Ohio band from Warped Tour favourite to the top end of the Billboard 200. We give it an 8/10.

How it came together

Joey Sturgis recorded it. He was the producer of the moment in 2009, working out of Connersville, Indiana, and Revolver later said his touch became the gold standard for the metalcore records that followed. The band itself was singer Mike Hranica, guitarists Chris Rubey and Jeremy DePoyster, who also sang the clean parts, keyboard player James Baney, bassist Andy Trick and drummer Daniel Williams.

Dez Moines came first. The band posted it on its MySpace page in March 2009, just as it set off on a headlining tour with A Day to Remember, Emarosa and Sky Eats Airplane. Fans who bought the album in advance at those shows got a download card for two of its songs. The cover is an acrylic painting by the metal artist Dan Seagrave. He's said one tree he kept seeing on walks in the countryside near Nottingham stuck in his mind, though he painted the cover quickly from his imagination.

It paid off fast. Blabbermouth reported on May 13, 2009, that the album sold 31,000 copies in the United States in its first week and debuted at No. 11 on the Billboard 200. It also reached No. 1 on Billboard's Christian, hard rock and independent album charts. That was a big jump from Plagues, which had peaked at No. 57 two years earlier.

What you're hearing

Sassafras opens the album and sets the rules. Hranica's screams drop into death growls, the guitars of Rubey and DePoyster lock into breakdowns, and Baney's keyboards fill the space with synths, piano and strings. Then DePoyster's clean voice breaks through on the chorus. That's the big change from Plagues. The older songs mostly charged from one riff to the next, but here a lot of them have a clear verse and a chorus you can sing.

Dez Moines and Assistant to the Regional Manager are the most immediate songs here. Danger: Wildman sets strings against the guitars and is the best showcase for Williams, who never sits on one groove for long. Ben Has a Kid is one Estabrooks singled out, a song that has you screaming one minute and singing along the next. Louder Than Thunder is the real surprise, a short song Estabrooks noted is completely melodic and much mellower than you'd expect, and it lands right before Lord Xenu closes things out.

Sturgis is the other star. Every part has its own room in the mix, from the low end of the breakdowns to the keys and the clean vocals, and that clean, punchy sound went on to shape a lot of metalcore records after it.

What it's about

The song titles are jokes. Assistant to the Regional Manager comes from the US version of The Office, and Lord Xenu is a Scientology reference. AllMusic took the titles as a sign the songs "aren't really about anything," but the lyrics tell a different story.

Assistant to the Regional Manager is written "to those who have wept" and turns on lines like "Fight life with life" and "All glory to the one in existence." Danger: Wildman goes after vanity and selfishness and lands on "All of love can be traced to a maker." These aren't worship songs, and Hranica doesn't preach. He circles death, pride and wasted time, then keeps pointing back to God as the way out.

What the critics said

Jesus Freak Hideout's Timothy Estabrooks gave it four and a half out of five in May 2009. He opened by saying these guys are "most definitely not quiet," and praised the new "soaring melodic choruses," noting that the band's older work "lacked a sense of musical structure." He admitted the formula "can become repetitive," but said the clean choruses "break through like a burst of sunlight," and called it "an excellent album and a worthy addition to the library of any hard music fan."

Gareth Hills at Cross Rhythms called it "a brutal outpouring of metallic heaviness" and gave Williams special mention. His complaint was that some tracks felt less like songs than "jigsaw pieces from a bag of riffs and breakdowns." He still recommended it, saying the band was "probing far deeper into the human condition and questions of faith than many other bands," and he called the moment the clean vocals break through on Sassafras "heart-stopping."

AllMusic's Stephen Thomas Erlewine was cooler on it. He heard progress through "not innovation but refinement," with the band's "vaguely Christian screamo sliding effortlessly toward pure metalcore."

The album's standing has only grown. Alternative Press later called it "the epitome of 2009 metalcore." Writing for Revolver in 2021, Eli Enis said the production "sounded absolutely exquisite by 2009 standards," and summed up its reach this way: "At the time, nothing else sounded quite like it." Then, as he put it, everything did.

Watch

Start with the official video for Danger: Wildman, directed by Spence Nicholson and posted by Ferret Music, the band's label, in August 2009. Then watch the official video for Assistant to the Regional Manager, which followed in April 2010 and also comes from Ferret.

The verdict

Why an eight? Because this is the album where The Devil Wears Prada worked out how to be heavy and catchy at once. Sassafras, Dez Moines and Danger: Wildman still hit hard, the clean choruses give the songs a shape Plagues didn't have, and Sturgis made it sound like nothing else in 2009. Why not a nine? Hills and Estabrooks were both right about the sameness. Across forty minutes the scream, breakdown and chorus pattern starts to feel familiar, and a few songs in the back half are hard to tell apart. Why not a seven? Because the best songs are among the strongest the band ever recorded, the lyrics have more faith and thought in them than the joke titles let on, and a No. 11 debut carried it well beyond the usual Christian hard music crowd. It belongs on the shelf next to Plagues as the heart of what The Devil Wears Prada sounded like at the end of the 2000s. Williams, whose drumming carries so much of this record, died on 22 May 2025. He was one of six people killed when a small jet crashed in San Diego.

8/10

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