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.
TWIABP’s sonic trajectory also dovetails with their increased focus on politics, which is either surprising given their newfound manicured shimmer, or expected, given their gradual exodus from emo, punk’s most solipsistic offshoot. Bello joined the band shortly before Whenever, If Ever’s release, and his leftist ethos has had just as much of an impact on TWIABP’s lyrics as Teti has had on the band’s compositions. Dreams of Being Dust is haunted by the many injustices of the modern world, chief among them the genocide in Gaza. Bello’s mentions of olive groves, child soldiers, smart bombs, fighter jets, and “the mother of the Jordan” on “Auguries of Guilt” drives this home.
The child of Puerto Rican and Lebanese parents, Bello’s earlier songs of protest centered his personal experiences: 2017’s “Marine Tigers,” for instance, recounts the hostility his father faced when arriving in New York. His lyrics here are more universal, but they’re also more impenetrable. It’s a paradox captured on Dreams of Being Dust’s “December 4th, 2024,” whose title evokes one of the band’s most beloved tracks, 2015’s “January 10th, 2014.” The earlier song tells the story of a female vigilante’s retaliatory murders in Juarez, Mexico; the latter, meanwhile, takes its name from the day that UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson was shot and killed, a flashpoint in the cultural conversation about health justice. The song contains some resonant moments—“We might as well be paying to breathe” goes one line—but Bello’s poetic vagueness mirrors the music TWIABP is currently making: It all sounds impressive, but it doesn’t move you.
At the climax of “January 10th, 2014,” Bello and Dvorak trade lines from the perspective of the killer and the victim over quiet instrumentation until the song explodes in a cathartic eruption. “December 4th, 2024,” on the other hand, meanders through four different movements, expanding its scope but watering down its potency. TWIABP are now making the most technically proficient music of their career and admirably facing down some of the world’s most dire issues. But in the pursuit of radical evolution, they’ve forsaken the emotional dynamism that has consistently buoyed their music through their tumultuous history.
