After 15 years on the road, Rend Collective sounds lighter. Not louder or flashier—just lighter. Like a band that’s finally shrugged off the need to prove anything.
The Northern Irish group that brought worship banjos to arenas and made praise songs feel like campfire anthems has grown up a bit. They’ve seen the inside of tour buses and hospital rooms, radio charts and family chaos. Somewhere along the way, frontman Chris Llewellyn says, they stopped worrying about what everyone else wanted from them.
“When we first started, I really wanted to be liked,” Llewellyn says. “I wanted to be a good boy and have everyone cheer me on. But after a while, you realize life’s too short for that. The Bible’s better than that, and our audience deserves more than that.”
That’s where Rend Collective lives now—somewhere between peace and provocation. They’re not interested in chasing formulas. They’re trying to make something honest.
Their latest project, Folk, hints at that shift. It’s unvarnished and deeply rooted in who they are, but Llewellyn bristles at the idea that this album defines them. It’s just another stop in a long journey toward creative freedom.
“We’ve bowed to pressure before,” he says. “Doing something different is scary. It’s tied to your livelihood and your faith and that human desire for approval. But middle age has rescued us. I can’t tell you how much less I care about what people think now.”
He laughs, but there’s truth underneath it. For a decade, Rend Collective was one of the few bands bringing a spark of rebellion to worship culture. Their earliest songs felt rough-cut, like they’d been recorded in a church basement with too many friends and not enough microphones. It worked. Their joy was contagious, their sound distinct, their energy impossible to fake.
But success in Christian music has a way of polishing the edges.
“People respond really well to familiarity,” Llewellyn says. “It’s like watching the same Christmas movie every year. The industry would rather release Avengers 9 than something brand new.”
He doesn’t say it bitterly. He just sounds done with pretending.
“There’s always this tension in the Christian story,” he says. “There’s the version of Jesus who sits at tables with everyone—gentle, loving, inclusive. But there’s also the Jesus who gets arrested and crucified by the state. There’s a political edge to him that feels uncomfortable. And worship should make space for that kind of Jesus too.”
That tension—between comfort and disruption—has shaped the band’s approach to faith and art. Llewellyn doesn’t write songs to tell people what to think. He wants to hand listeners a question and trust them to wrestle with it.
“If I spell it out, I’ve done it wrong,” he says. “I want to provoke thought. That’s the part of Christian art that’s missing—giving people the dignity to draw their own conclusions and do something interesting with them.”
He pauses before adding, “That’s what I think art is supposed to do. Not just decorate belief, but stretch it.”
That mindset has pulled Rend Collective closer to who they were in the beginning—scrappy, idealistic, wide-eyed about what worship could be. But it’s also made them more grounded. They’re fathers now, husbands, mentors. Their sense of mission has matured.
“One of the most beautiful things about identity is that, so early in the story, God declares us good,” Llewellyn says. “Sometimes we think we start from a deficit, like God doesn’t like us as we are. But there’s something innately good, something of the image of God in us. That’s where it starts for me.”
That belief—simple, unflashy and hard-won—is what’s keeping Rend Collective moving forward. They’re still touring, still writing, still showing up for the people who find hope in their songs. But they’re doing it with different energy now. Less striving. More presence.
“I just hope our songs make people think,” Llewellyn says. “If they make someone wrestle, or wonder, or believe again, then we’ve done what we came here to do.”
This fall, the band will take that spirit on the road again, playing a string of North American dates before heading back to Europe. The setlist mixes new songs with old favorites, but the vibe, Llewellyn says, is different—more communal, less performative.
“It feels like family now,” he says. “We’re not here to impress anyone. We’re here to remind people that there’s still beauty, still hope, still something worth singing about.”
After all these years, Rend Collective hasn’t lost their spark. They’ve just learned where to aim it.