Most bands will never have a portion of their careers encased in amber, remembered as “significant” enough to sell tickets to album anniversary tours. It’s a privilege, but it can also distort the historical record, placing nostalgic weight on one phase in a band’s career that may not represent its entire trajectory. The World Is a Beautiful Place & I Am No Longer Afraid to Die were one of the key players in the “emo revival” of the early 2010s, defined by “back to the basement” aesthetics following a decade of commercially successful mall-punk. On their acclaimed first two albums, TWIABP consisted of up to 10 members pumping out earnest, post-rock-influenced emo. But in the ensuing decade, they pared down the lineup and moved in a heavier, proggier direction; now, they barely resemble the band that once convinced indie rock elitists to give emo another shot.
“Dimmed Sun,” which opens the band’s latest album, Dreams of Being Dust, defines this new direction as it alternates between burly metalcore and cleaner, more expansive prog-emo. Gnarly, compressed guitars are paired with shouted or snarled vocals; noodly harmonized riffs accompany the more skyward-reaching singing. Throughout it all, drummer Steven Buttery gets busy, breaking free of the chains of the slow-build climaxes that once hamstrung his abilities. TWIABP’s music has always been maximalist—it’s hard not to be with 10 people on stage—but their current busy assault makes their early blend of twinkly Midwest emo and climactic post-rock feel sparse by comparison.
So while there’s a drastic gulf between Dreams of Being Dust and their ambitious debut, it’s not entirely unexpected. It’s due, in large part, to guitarist and producer Chris Teti, one of the band’s longest-tenured members. Teti has long seemed like TWIABP’s resident post-hardcore influence: headbanging in front of his massive stack amp; contributing to albums by bands like Misery Signals, Enabler, and Hollow Earth; and touring in metalcore supergroup END. Since 2021’s Illusory Walls, his fingerprints have become more noticeable in TWIABP’s sound: Listening to that record today, its first half sounds like a trial run for the band’s latest, and its two epic closers—the latter of which concludes with a callback to their debut—read as the conclusion of TWIABP’s first chapter.
Teti co-produced Dreams of Being Dust (and its predecessor) with END’s Greg Thomas, and it also features guest vocals by Church Tongue’s Mike Sugars, Full of Hell’s Dylan Walker, and END and Counterparts frontman Brendan Murphy. That rolodex yields predictably beefier results. “Beware the Centrist” is almost straight-up hardcore—lead vocalist David Bello will probably never actually bellow, but synth player and singer Katie Dvorak certainly does here. Prog-core songs like “Dimmed Sun” and “Captagon” recall a specific moment in the 2000s populated by heavy, prog-adjacent bands like Circa Survive and Coheed and Cambria whose sound seemed equally indebted to Rush and Glassjaw. A few slower tracks on Dreams of Being Dust bear some similarities to TWIABP’s original DNA, but flashy production aesthetics—near-constant guitar compression; atmospheric synths—couldn’t be further from the band’s scrappy origins. It was surprising to see the band sign with the big-ticket, punk-leaning label Epitaph in 2015, but they finally sound right at home.
