I Prevail faced skepticism from people in the music industry who dismissed the band as “just a cover band,” according to Eric Vanlerberghe in an interview with Kerrang. The band used the criticism as fuel to reinvent their sound and prove their doubters wrong.
Vanlerberghe explained that many in the industry did not take I Prevail seriously at first. Some refused to book the band because they saw them as temporary and unoriginal.
“We struggled with people calling us ‘just a cover band’,” Vanlerberghe said. “We knew people in the industry who didn’t want to put us on a show because [they thought we were] just a flash in the pan.”
The band’s turning point came when they committed to writing new material. They completed an EP and then spent a year on a full-length record.
“But we wrote an EP over the course of a year, and created that cover over the course of a weekend,” he explained. “Then we spent the next year writing a full-length record. A lot of the band’s sentiment was to prove everyone wrong. We put everything we had back into the live show and are actually writing better music than we’ve ever written before.”
Vanlerberghe made these comments while discussing how I Prevail responded to the doubters who questioned their place in the metal scene.
The dismissal stemmed in part from the band’s early viral success with a Taylor Swift cover. I Prevail posted a cover of “Blank Space” to YouTube in December 2014, which became so popular it was eventually certified platinum in the US. This led many in the industry to see the band as a novelty act rather than serious musicians with their own sound.
The path forward required overcoming significant obstacles. Co-vocalist Brian Burkheiser suffered a serious vocal injury before the release of Trauma in 2019 that threatened his ability to continue as a singer. Despite this challenge, the band pushed through and crafted the album without outside input. The record earned a Grammy nomination for Best Rock Album, and the song “Bow Down,” which vented the band’s frustrations about the music industry, received a nomination for Best Metal Performance.
By 2025, I Prevail had undergone another major shift. The band parted ways with Burkheiser, leaving Vanlerberghe to handle both clean and harsh vocals on the group’s fourth album. Violent Nature was released in September 2025 and marked the first record to feature bassist Jon Eberhard, who also produced the album. The band had transformed from a cover act into established songwriters and performers.
