Three Days Grace - One-X (2006)
you do this all in v(a/e)in - march 25, 2026
Sometimes you get hooked on some truly disposable media. You know the type. It’s the landfill indie, the teeny-bopper pop, the absolute slop that you can never exorcise from your head. In my case, being a card carrying member of the High Council of the Post-Grunge Enjoyment Society, it’s the Sirius XM Octane butt-rock that completely dominated hard rock radio from 1998 until now. I have encyclopedic knowledge (that I really wish I didn’t have) of all that bad post-grunge and alt-metal from all the greats like Breaking Benjamin and Staind to some real deep cuts like Janus. They are all utterly disposable and will remain with me until I die. I can’t help but return to one particular band, though, with some sort of genuine critical examination. The scene-ish dorks known as Three Days Grace endear themselves to me. One-X, their sophomore album from 2006, in particular. Something about it feels like it could be so much more than what we got.
Much of One-X can be charitably described as alright if you really turn your brain off. There is absolutely nothing original about this album within the wider context of popular hard rock music in the mid-2000s. Nothing separates Three Days Grace from their peers except for a very fun willingness to dive more into the emotional distress you’d expect from an emo band. It ranges in quality from that satisfying kick-ass hell-yeah “Cheers from Iraq” type of hard rock that still worms into playlists today, to some truly quizzically empty songs. The title track, in particular, seems like it only realized late in production that it was, in fact, the title track, and desperately tried to pull something together while accidentally plagiarizing Chumbawumba (of all bands???) in the process. I don’t think you’re in the mood for originality, variety, or intricate, articulate songwriting if you’re listening to Three Days Grace, though. You’re listening to this album because you need empty musical calories after a bad breakup. This album functions admirably as an angst eater, soaking up your negative impulses and refracting them back through Drop-D tuning and lyrics about… well, whatever’s beating you up in your life. Just blast it in the shower as you bang your head against the wall and you’re set.
However, there lies a distinct oxycodone-shaped hole at the core of One-X. It’s easy to ignore under the language of outcasts and breakups, but it’s also not hard to notice just how much of it is really about opioids when you look past all the generic rallying cries. About half of the tracklist was written while Adam Gontier was in rehab for oxy addiction, and they carry the embers of the withdrawal, recovery, isolation, and resentment left over from that process. These are the best tracks on the album. The singles, “Get Out Alive,” “Over and Over,” and others feel a lot more confident in themselves than the songs written after Adam checked out and rejoined the band. I really don’t think this can be overlooked within the context of One-X’s creation, because it actually forces the record to be about something. Thinking about it, how can much of this album be written from a perspective of anyone other than a survivor of addiction? Where else can the atonement and the reckoning come from? The realization that your past life, the one before the holes you burned in your timeline, is gone, and the people from beyond that veil will probably never take you back? The still-present, faded but very much there feeling of hope that’s still running through you? The hatred and abuse from the biggest tracks on their self-titled are very notably absent, replaced with a bitter reflection and the realization that you’re coping very hard over your inability to get that old life again. It’s actually, dare I say it, interesting.
At the same time, it feels like Three Days Grace got spooked out of making a drug album, and so a lot of that messaging got buried under the emo loner bullshit, twirling along the edge of the abyss with a million little ambiguities and double meanings. This is a strange dance that One-X can’t pull off, and it results in something much blander than it should be. It’s not a dance it should’ve been attempting in the first place. At the time this album came out, North America was becoming familiar with the omnipresence of opioids beyond heroin. Oxycodone was the face of a drug epidemic that flowed, primarily, from the doctor’s office. We were getting a taste of the pure death that flowed out from chronic pain prescriptions and, god forbid, pill mills that placed painkillers in the hands of people who promptly got addicted to them. If there was any time to make an album for people going through the same struggle as Adam, it would’ve been right there in the mid-00s. Not taking that dive and pulling back into general angst hamstrings the whole thing. It’s scared of its own concept.
So why, exactly, do I feel so strongly about a mid post-grunge album from 2006? Well, first off, I’m a card-carrying member of the High Council of the Post-Grunge Enjoyment Society, so whatever I say is law.
...
…But, like, look, man. It’s fent.
This review is about fentanyl.
At the time I’m writing this in 2026, America has just started to ascend from the depths of the worst drug epidemic in history. The wave that started with oxy never stopped. Starting in 2017 and catching fire with the pandemic, fentanyl broke this continent over its knee. It’s something that got obscured with the totality of COVID, but if your family didn’t already get fucked by that, there’s a distinct chance fent played the same role. What was medical malpractice-turned-private shame, suffering and struggle in the 2000s became a national fucking tragedy in the 2010s. We watched communities get shredded en masse as fent tore through the continent. You can’t go through whole regions of the United States without finding someone who lost someone they knew, someone they loved, to addiction. Hundreds of thousands of people died. Even more are left scattered to the wind. And it all came from the pharmaceutical industry and the policies that allowed it to run roughshod over everything it touched.
There’s a few things that fucked us all up over the past 20 years that we never really talk about because everyone who got hit completely clocked out of reality and never clocked back in again. The housing crisis was one of them, especially after the bankers gambling away your parents’ mortgage avoided any jail time. COVID was the second. Fentanyl is becoming a third. There’s no real voice for everyone who had their lives completely murked by fent. What is there is all just political gamesmanship. No pharma dynasties or cogs in the medical-industrial machine will ever face punishment. There is no reckoning. We just silently bury our dead and comply with the new reality.
I look back over at the other side of the chasm, and I see One-X. I see the album it is, and the album it could have been. The album we got is aggressively fine, but disappointing. It’s a generic post-grunge album with a lot of catchy, chugging, replaceable songs that are maximalist in only the way those mid-00s guys know how to do. I can see why it became the raging success it did, carrying that outcast appeal that delighted both the scene kids and the guys wearing Tapout and Affliction t-shirts. This was the album you could play in front of your emo friend, your friend who was maybe a bit too into UFC, and your dad, without any of them calling you a faggot. At the same time, it’s definitely missing something. There’s a big chunk of its soul that got taken out somewhere along the way. It keeps the album from ever feeling like it comes from someplace true. It's an album that doesn't really deserve the retrospection.
Behind it, I see the One-X that would have come from Three Days Grace engaging with what really lay at its foundations. We could’ve had a One-X just as heavy, just as brooding, but more willing to lay bare the journey through the trenches of opioid addiction, without the obfuscation under all the layers of edge. Was this band even capable of delivering such an album? I have absolutely no clue. I can take a guess that its riffs and structures would’ve been just as generic. But I do wish we got something more focused, something more frank, something more willing to be a voice for what nobody wanted to think about, at the time or now. Lord knows, someone could’ve ended up resonating with it, with how big of a hit the record we got was. If anyone could’ve brought their full experience to tape, it would’ve been Adam. It didn’t have to be a definitive statement. Just something genuine. Just one voice bringing themself forward would do.
a schizo is talking listen and learn