3 days ago
‘Fallen between the cracks': The mystery of New Zealand's lost emo anthem
Alex Casey goes in search of 'Crawl' by Atlas, the beloved mid-2000s emo anthem that's 'fallen between the cracks'.
It's some time in 2007 and Britomart is swarming with gloomy loiterers, their sullen faces hidden behind swooping side fringes, black eyeliner and snakebite piercings. The black jeans are so tight that they can't possibly require that many studded belts, not to mention the stacks of leather chokers limiting the flow of oxygen to the brain. Perhaps this is why the crowd soon collapses into a state of mass unconsciousness, Nokia 3315s strewn far and wide, as two brave survivors unleash a battle cry to help them claw through the morose milieu.
'I won't fall between the cracks, yeah / Just leave some space for me to learn to crawl'
'Crawl' by Atlas was the biggest New Zealand single of 2007, clinging to number one in the charts for seven weeks and eventually becoming the sixth biggest song of the year (between 'Bartender' by T-Pain ft. Akon and 'Because of You' by Ne-Yo). Nearly two decades later, the YouTube comments beneath the music video are littered with happy memories. 'I am Korean and when I was in NZ in 2007 I could hear this song everywhere,' shares one commenter. 'This was a banger in my childhood, never even knew it was a kiwi song,' adds another.
But through the nostalgic haze, there's also a sense of bubbling rage from hundreds upon hundreds of New Zealanders who can't find 'Crawl' on any music streaming platforms. 'It is a crime that this song was number 1 on C4 tv for soooo long and its not even on spotty [Spotify]' someone wrote just last year, garnering 320 likes in support. 'Sucks that spotify doesn't have this song grrr' has 520 likes, and was written eight years ago. Even the relatively fresh '2025 and still waiting for this track to drop on Spotify!' has already got 77 likes.
One such aggrieved New Zealander is Justine Sachs, a self-described 'Crawl' superfan. 'It's just the perfect song,' she says. Not only does Sachs enjoy the 'crazy belter' chorus and the harmonies from Beth Campbell – 'Evanescence couldn't. Hayley from Paramore couldn't' – she also resonated with the social message as a moody teen. 'It's all about people falling between the cracks, being kept down by the man. It's like the system is coming down on all of us, and all we need is space to learn to crawl,' she pauses. 'Not even walk, man, just crawl.'
The timing was pertinent too. 'This 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.' Watching the music video every afternoon on C4 also helped canonise 'Crawl'. 'Britomart was such an important spot for me and my friends. When you're 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.'
But seasons change, fringes grow out, and eventually the world moved on. The futuristic fountain of Britomart, home to 'Crawl' and also 'We Gon' Ride' was removed to extend the station, and Sachs similarly turned her back on her roots. 'I tried to suppress my emo background and pretend it all never happened,' she says. That was until about a decade later, at Shadows Bar in the University of Auckland, when a few words from 'Crawl' crept back into her mind. Nobody else remembered it, insisting she was thinking of 'Crawling' by Linkin Park.
Sachs took to Spotify but couldn't find any evidence of the song, and spent some time wondering if she had made it up. 'For a while I couldn't even remember it enough to find any evidence of it, but I also knew deep down that a part of me was missing,' she says. After getting into another heated discussion about 'Crawl' at a party, she went home and finally found the music video on YouTube. 'It was a real renaissance moment for me – I even made a playlist of New Zealand pop punk and emo, but I was so sad because I couldn't add 'Crawl'.'
Now, 'a few times a year', Sachs is forced to load up YouTube to play 'Crawl' at parties and other assorted social situations, complete with pre-roll ads. 'It's not ideal at all, and it's actually a disservice to a very important song,' she says. 'I'm really trying my best to support artists – I don't even have Spotify and use Apple Music now – but I don't want to get YouTube Premium just for this one song.' Asked if she has a message for Atlas, Sachs is clear: 'I want to know why their song isn't on streaming services, and I also just want to know if they are OK.'
Ben Campbell, founding member of Atlas, is OK. He's busy, in fact, running a restaurant in Akaroa, and doesn't 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.
'We 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,' says Campbell. They decided then and there to start a band together – working name Tall Poppies – 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.
As for 'Crawl', Campbell remembers writing it in a flurry in their flat in Addington. They didn't 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. 'That's when I thought, OK, there's something really catchy here,' 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.
'That first week that it charted at number one, we just absolutely lost it,' says Campbell. 'Each week we'd sit there at that same spot at Andy's 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.'
Next came the music video, which was shot in a single day outside Britomart train station. 'It felt like such a big budget production for us, because all of a sudden, here we were in Auckland's CBD with full film crews, run sheets, actors,' says Campbell. 'It 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.'
Cheesy wigs aside, Campbell says 'Crawl' was still a highlight of his career. 'Zed actually never had a number one single, so for me and Andy, that was a huge thing to tick off – it just happened to be on a different project,' he laughs. Although their next single 'Magic 8' peaked at number 27 in the charts, Atlas rode the momentum of 'Crawl' into tours with Silverchair and Stereophonics, before getting stuck into their second album. 'The new material was really exciting and strong, we had really matured as a band and we were really ready,' says Campbell.
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. 'He had this kind of ball bearing rattling in his voice,' says Campbell. 'The man's always had a bit of a growl, but something was really wrong with his voice – it sounded broken.' 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. 'Nobody could get to the bottom of it,' says Campbell. 'His voice just didn't bounce back.'
With Cunningham's voice being such a big part of the band's identity, they all agreed that there was no point trying to take Atlas any further without him. 'It 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,' Campbell says. 'So 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.'
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's back catalogue is nowhere to be found on any of the digital streamers. 'I believe it's because the licensing agreement with Warners expired and no one took ownership of the digital onboarding,' says Campbell. 'Spotify didn't exist when Crawl was released, so it has effectively fallen between the cracks.'
Making things even more difficult is the fact that nobody knows where the original masters are for the album. 'Andy's going to have a search through his barn and see if there's a dusty old Atlas box somewhere,' 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. 'Everything in the industry has changed completely from when I was in it,' says Campbell. 'I don't even know what the process is for setting up an Atlas Spotify account.'
Warner Music are yet to respond to The Spinoff's inquiries about 'Crawl', but Campbell is hopeful they can bring the smash hit of 2007 to streaming platforms soon. 'It's 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's cool to know that people want to hear it.' Cunningham, whose voice has since recovered, even returned to Christchurch earlier this year and performed an acoustic version of 'Crawl'. Time for an Atlas reunion, perhaps? 'Now, wouldn't that be fun,' says Campbell.
As for reformed emo Sachs, news of a 'Crawl' comeback couldn't come sooner. 'Look, we're back in an economic depression, and people are feeling just as emo as they were in 2007,' she says.
