This is an excerpt from the February 2014 issue of Guitar World. For the rest of this story, plus our "Van Halen 1984 Revisited" interview with Eddie Van Halen and features on Zakk Wylde & Ozzy Osbourne, Jake E. Lee, Tosin Abasi, Steel Panther, Five Finger Death Punch and John Petrucci's monthly column — check out the February 2014 issue at the Guitar World Online Store.

In the 10 years that they’ve been together, A Day to Remember have worked their way up from low-rent DIY van tours to major arena outings.

Their 2013 House Party Tour required three buses and five semis to haul the five-member-band and its crew, gear and elaborate stage sets from venue to venue. For each show, the group’s small army of roadies erected a full-size house on the stage every night. Not even Alice Cooper did that.

“It was really cool,” says lead guitarist Kevin Skaff. “At the beginning of the night, the garage door on the house would open up and we’d come out of the garage for our intro—because we gotta pay homage to the garage band that we were when we started out. And the house was built so that you could walk upstairs and go play on the roof. It was a lot of fun to play guitar from that high up. And it was cool having a big production like that, with pyro and shit. We’ve come a long way.”

But on a recent winter night, the members of A Day to Remember found themselves crammed into a van rolling down a North Carolina back road en route to a small club gig. It was quite a step down from the giddy heights of big-bang arena touring, but as Skaff says, you gotta honor your roots. A Day to Remember were doing the one-off gig as a favor to a local radio station that had given heavy airplay to their music. And they loved every lowball minute of it.

“We were gonna fly in,” says rhythm guitarist Neil Westfall. “But the airport was closed due to fog, and our flight got canceled. So we rented a van at 11 o’clock at night, jumped in, drove five hours and got there. It felt like we were back where we started, playing 500-capacity rooms. It was awesome!”

“It felt good to do that again,” Skaff adds. “Neil drove, and I just sat shotgun. We blasted music, and everyone else was passed out in the back. It was just like back in the day.”

“I started doing regional touring when I was 15,” Westfall reflects, “and it was just the most exciting thing to be out on the road with your friends. I mean there were no parents around! You could do whatever you wanted. It was crazy. We slept on a lot of people’s floors. Met a lot of cool people. Learned a lot about the world in general. That’s where I learned to be me.”

A Day to Remember are hardly the first band to meld pop-punk melodicism with thrashy metalcore Sturm und Drang. But their unique “Children of the Warped Tour” blend of these styles has earned them a devoted following, enabling them to sell more than a million copies of the five albums they’ve recorded to date. Their latest, Common Courtesy, debuted at Number 11 on Billboard’s Top 200 Albums chart.

The lockstep juggernaut assault of Skaff and Westfall’s heavily down-tuned guitars plays no small role in Common Courtesy’s appeal. Westfall is the kind of rhythm guitarist who can turn on a dime from chuggy metal aggression to punk rock frenzy. And Skaff can squeal, chime and twang in all the right ways and places. He commands a wider tonal palette than guitarists in either metalcore or pop punk. He even throws down some very credible vintage clean tones on more acoustic guitar–driven tracks, like “I’m Already Gone,” “I Surrender” and “End of Me.”

“I grew up listening to southern rock and blues, like the Allman Brothers, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Jimi Hendrix and all that good stuff,” Skaff says. “And then Neil is very modern. He loves his Blink-182 and Bury Your Dead.” With the muscular support of Joshua Woodard on bass and Alex Shelnutt on drums, the guitar work is all in the service of singer Jeremy McKinnon’s inspired yowling. An able switch hitter in his own right, he handles the band’s extreme metal “Cookie Monster gets gastritis” vocal growls and the more tuneful “drunk jock sing-along” anthemic punk melodies.

But there were moments when A Day to Remember weren’t sure if Common Courtesy would ever see the light of day. Shortly after the release of their previous album, What Separates Me from You, the band became embroiled in a contractual lawsuit with Victory Records, its label at the time. A Day to Remember would eventually win the case, free themselves from their former label and strike an advantageous distribution deal with SKH Music for the release of Common Courtesy.

But for a while, the going was tough. “The only real goal we had was, ‘How the hell are we going to get this record out?’ ” Skaff says. “Because we were tied up in litigation.”

For the rest of this story, plus our "Van Halen 1984 Revisited" interview with Eddie Van Halen and features on Zakk Wylde & Ozzy Osbourne, Jake E. Lee, Tosin Abasi, Steel Panther, Five Finger Death Punch and John Petrucci's monthly column