Three decades into Papa Roach’s career, with enough hits to fill a festival set twice over, Jacoby Shaddix is not interested in nostalgia. Not really. What drives him now is something harder to fake: survival, and what comes after it.
Because for Shaddix, the story was never just about making it out alive. It’s about what you do when you’re still here.
In Australia for a co-headline run with A Day to Remember, he sounds wired, restless in a way that feels less like anxiety and more like anticipation.
“I’ve been like a caged-up animal,” he says, laughing. “I haven’t been on stage for a minute, so it’s really good to be back, making noise with the boys.”
There’s momentum behind him too. The band’s latest single “Wake Up Calling” is already picking up globally, another reminder that Papa Roach are still building something new in real time.
And for all the years, all the cycles, and all the trends they’ve outlived, Shaddix still talks about music like it’s necessary.
“Music has been such a great way for me to untether this tangled ball of yarn of life,” he says. “And it’s a reflection of just the raw emotions that we all walk through.”
Love Music?
Get your daily dose of everything happening in Australian/New Zealand music and globally.
That instinct to tell the truth, even when it’s uncomfortable, didn’t come fully formed. Early on, Shaddix admits he was writing lyrics that didn’t mean much of anything. It took someone calling him out on it to change everything.
“I had a friend who knew me really well,” he says. “And he was like, ‘Why don’t you just write about your life?’”
The result was “Broken Home”, and with it, a shift that would define the band’s entire trajectory.
“It was like a floodgate opened,” he says. “I talked about this pain and this hole in my heart… but also forgiving my father in the same breath.”
From that point on, Papa Roach’s music stopped being abstract. It became specific. Personal. Sometimes uncomfortable. But always honest.
Papa Roach’s breakthrough moment came not long after, with “Last Resort”, a song that tackled self-harm and suicidal ideation at a time when those conversations were still largely absent from mainstream rock. It wasn’t framed as a statement or a campaign then; it was just the truth, laid bare.
In hindsight, though, it set the tone for everything that followed — a band willing to go there, even when it was uncomfortable, and an audience that recognised themselves in it.
“There’s a lot of darkness in the music,” Shaddix says. “But there’s also this element of hope that I always have to tether into it. Because if I just stay in the dark, there’s no healing.”
That balance — pain and hope, wreckage and repair — is what’s kept the band from becoming frozen in time. Where some acts document the struggle and stop there, Papa Roach have kept pushing the story forward.
That shift is clearest in how Shaddix talks about purpose.
“I’ve always thought that our music is purpose-driven music,” he says. “It’s more than just a song. With a song like ‘Leave a Light On’… it was a movement.”
He doesn’t say it lightly. That song became part of a broader push into mental health advocacy, something they now treat as being at the core of what they do.
“There has to be a point where we give back,” he says. “Our fans have given us an amazing life.”
On this Australian run, that means putting money from every show directly into local organisations. In Melbourne, the band are set to visit Orygen Youth Mental Health in Melbourne, a service working on the frontline of mental health support. .
“We’re not just talking about it,” Shaddix says. “We are about it.”
It’s a model that’s become more intentional over time, focusing on local impact, city by city, rather than broad, distant gestures.
“What I’ve learned about the healing process of life,” he continues, “is that serving is to get out of myself. Stop thinking about myself and go serve somebody else.”
Shaddix doesn’t dress it up. For him, healing isn’t about sitting in the pain indefinitely or endlessly analysing it. It’s about moving through it and then turning outward. “If I’m stuck in self, self, self… it’s a trap. Serving somebody else can put things in perspective.”
It’s a philosophy that’s clearly been shaped by experience: sobriety, accountability, and what he describes as a spiritual life that’s become central to how he operates. It’s changed the way he understands his own struggles.
“A lot of my depression stemmed from self-loathing,” he says. “And once I got out of myself and started helping others, that’s when I experienced real growth.”
There’s no neat resolution in the way he talks about it. No sense that he’s arrived at some permanent enlightenment; if anything, it sounds like something he has to actively choose, over and over again.
That same sense of perspective runs through how he looks back on the band’s trajectory.
“I had to let go of my early ideas of success and the ego that it brought me,” he reflects. “Because we took a rocket ship ride to the top in the very beginning… and then there were a few years that were very humbling.”
That humbling, combined with getting sober and “cleaning up the wreckage,” forced a reset on Shaddix, not just personally but creatively.
“I think that evolution of who I am and what I stand for has changed,” he says. “And that reflects in the music.”
It’s also what’s kept Papa Roach moving forward while others stalled. Now, in 2026, Shaddix says they’re experiencing some of the biggest success of their career.
But the way he talks about it is different. Less entitlement. More awareness.
“I’ve got to remind myself on a daily basis,” he says. “There are people in the world without clean running water… people sleeping on the streets. My life is pretty dang good.”
Where once their music was primarily cathartic for him, now it feels like a shared experience, something that belongs just as much to the crowd as it does to the band.
“When I see somebody in the thick of it… you can see it in their eyes when they’re singing,” he says. “That’s when I feel like I’m living my true purpose.”
View this post on Instagram
For Australian audiences, that connection has always hit a little differently, and Shaddix talks about it with a genuine affection.
“There’s just a kindness here,” he says. “A sunshine that comes out of people.”
This time around, he’s planning to soak up some of that outside the venues too, finally making it to Rottnest Island, chasing that postcard version of Australia he missed last time. But the real pull is still the shows themselves. “It’s about being in the room together. That’s what really moves people.”
If there’s one place where all of this converges — the past, the growth, the ongoing work — it’s in “Wake Up Calling”.
“I’ve got this self-destruct button,” Shaddix says. “And this song is about that.” Then he adds, more plainly: “It’s about standing on the edge of disaster and choosing love over self-destruction.”
“There’s comfort in self-destruction sometimes,” he admits. “And I have to be reminded that’s not where I’m supposed to be.”
View this post on Instagram
So he builds systems around himself: his band, his family, his faith, his fans. Things that pull him back when he drifts “Thank God I’ve got people around me that love and respect me. Even when I don’t see the good in myself.”
That’s the maturity in Papa Roach now. Not just documenting the fall, but choosing, consciously and repeatedly, not to fall back into it.
For a band that’s been around this long, it would be easy to reduce the story to endurance. Longevity. Survival. But that’s not quite it. Because survival was just the first part.
“I think a lot of us just have to continue to take a deep look inward,” Shaddix says. “Try to fix the things that are broken within us so that we can shine outwards.”
He pauses, then adds, almost to himself, “God, we all need some hope.”
Ticket information for Papa Roach’s Australian tour with A Day to Remember is available here.
