At the end
of March of 2003, 50 Cent's Get Rich or Die Tryin' sat atop the Billboard album
chart for its fourth week. Right below it were three other recent chart-toppers
it had dethroned: Norah Jones' Come Away With Me, R. Kelly's Chocolate Factory,
and Dixie Chicks' Home. And coming in at No. 5 was a surprise hit from a band
that had never been seen around these parts before, AFI, with their major label
debut Sing the Sorrow. The album had come out on March 11, following the
success of its lead single "Girl's Not Grey" on rock radio. The
song's surrealistic, David Slade-directed music video — which went on to win a
VMA — showed off the band and their eyeliner-wearing frontman Davey Havok,
whose aesthetic would get AFI grouped with burgeoning bands like The Used and
My Chemical Romance as mainstream media began conflating the words
"goth" and "emo." But those
comparisons were surface-level, and AFI were already seasoned vets compared to
most of the bands they were getting compared to. Sing the Sorrow served as so
many people's introduction to AFI, but it was an album they'd been working
toward for more than a decade.