Brandon Ebel founded Tooth & Nail Records in Seattle in 1993 with a straightforward argument: Christian teenagers deserved music that actually rocked.
The label came up at a moment when Contemporary Christian Music was dominated by adult contemporary radio fodder and the assumption that faith-based audiences would take whatever they were given. Tooth & Nail rejected that premise. It signed punk bands, metalcore acts, ska groups and emo kids, building a roster that looked more like an indie rock label than anything you’d find in a Christian bookstore.
Through the late 1990s and into the mid-2000s, Tooth & Nail became the rare label with genuine crossover credibility on both sides of the Christian-secular divide. Its artists were showing up on Warped Tour, getting reviewed in mainstream music press and selling records to kids who had no idea the label had a religious identity at all. That reach shaped a generation of young Christians who didn’t have to choose between their faith and their taste in music — Tooth & Nail had made the case that no such choice was necessary.
The momentum didn’t last. By the late 2000s, many of the label’s signature acts had broken up, moved to larger secular labels or simply faded. Streaming gutted the Christian music economy the same way it gutted every other niche, and Tooth & Nail’s particular moment — the church van, the burned CD, the youth group playlist — passed.
In 2013, Ebel sold the label’s catalog to Capitol Christian Music Group, though he retained the name and trademarks and almost immediately relaunched Tooth & Nail as an independent operation. The label is still active today, signing new artists and, in 2025, releasing a 30th anniversary box set of remastered vinyl from its early catalog.
What it built in its prime, though, is the part that stuck.
These are five albums from those years.
MxPx, Life in General (1996)
Before MxPx was playing Warped Tour and getting coverage in secular punk zines, they were three kids from Bremerton, Wash., making fast, loud, earnest pop-punk that sounded nothing like what you’d expect to find in the church library. Life in General was the album that cracked them wide open — 18 tracks in under 40 minutes, buzzing with hooks about everyday frustration and a faith that didn’t ask you to be polished about it. It proved Tooth & Nail’s core early argument: that Christian kids deserved something exciting, not safe.
Further Seems Forever, The Moon Is Down (2001)
There’s a footnote that haunts this record before you even hit play: Chris Carrabba had already quit Further Seems Forever when the band walked into the studio. He agreed to record vocals anyway, and what came out of those sessions became one of the defining documents of the moment emo crossed from underground to mainstream. The rest of the band brought roots in Florida hardcore and an almost combative internal chemistry — everyone pushing to outdo each other, and the music benefiting enormously from it. Carrabba’s voice, more soaring than the era’s typical strained emo delivery, gave the record a reach most of his peers couldn’t match. He left for Dashboard Confessional immediately after, and this particular lineup never made music together again. What they left behind was a classic.
Underoath, They’re Only Chasing Safety (2004)
Released on Solid State Records, Tooth & Nail’s heavier imprint, this was the album that introduced an entire generation of Christian teenagers to the idea that screaming could be worshipful. “They’re Only Chasing Safety” pushed Underoath away from straight metalcore and toward something more textured and melodic — Spencer Chamberlain’s screams trading off against Aaron Gillespie’s clean vocals in a way that felt genuinely emotional rather than calculated. For a lot of kids, this was the first heavy record that felt like it was talking about something that mattered. Some of them still haven’t found anything that hits quite the same.
Copeland, Beneath Medicine Tree (2003)
Not every kid who bought records from Tooth & Nail wanted to mosh. “Beneath Medicine Tree” offered something quieter and harder to shake — Aaron Marsh’s high, fragile voice over slow-building arrangements that owed more to late-night sadness than Sunday morning certainty. The album’s emotional honesty gave space to grief, longing and doubt in a way that Christian music of the era often didn’t, and it landed accordingly. Millennial Christians who grew up keeping a journal probably still have this one somewhere, dog-eared in their memory the way certain passages get underlined and never quite forgotten.
Anberlin, Never Take Friendship Personal (2005)
By the mid-2000s, Tooth & Nail had enough credibility in the broader alternative rock world that its artists were crossing over without apology, and Anberlin led the charge. Never Take Friendship Personal is the sound of a band absolutely sure of itself — Stephen Christian’s voice confident and theatrical, the guitars cinematic, the whole record held together by a kind of ache that adolescence manufactures in industrial quantities. It got played everywhere — from secular radio to prom. It still gets played at weddings by people who couldn’t tell you the label that put it out, which is maybe the highest compliment a Tooth & Nail record can receive.
