Like most floridly-named, heavily populated post-rock acts before them, the World Is a Beautiful Place & I Am No Longer Afraid to Die are utopians. Their vision of Earth 2 was fully realized on 2015’s brilliant Harmlessness, a marquee indie event that celebrated feminist vigilante justice, made evil cower in its own shadow, and encouraged everyone to pursue self-care and self-actualization with wild abandon. Two years later, its opener “You Can’t Live There Forever” plays as a kind of cruel foreshadowing of a paradise lost.
For one thing, that song’s lead vocal came from D. Nicole Shanholtzer, dismissed from the band in 2016. And now, they’re maybe finally having second thoughts about their name. On TWIABP’s vital, bristling third LP Always Foreign, primary songwriter David Bello looks at his Puerto Rican and Lebanese heritage, his upbringing in West Virginia, and his status as an artist in a realm that fetishizes anxiety and comes the same conclusion as the rest of us: The world is an increasingly terrible place and we should all be scared to death.
“I’ll make everything look like it’s rad,” Bello sings early on. Everything really did appear to be rad on both Harmlessness and their 2013 debut Whenever, If Ever, albums that were almost mercilessly uplifting. They were cinematic rock music promising happy endings: “The world is a beautiful place/But we have to make it that way,” they sang on Whenever, If Ever’s eternal set-closer “Getting Sodas.” The strain of that work is already apparent on Always Foreign’s opener “I’ll Make Everything”, wearily promising “a story of love,” and “The Future” stops short of delivering an unambiguous message of hope: “The future just got here again and again now/The present was awful but it’s all past now.” The best we can do, it seems, is just tell ourselves is that it can’t get any worse.
The shift from magical thinking to realism has made TWIABP a noticeably more pragmatic band. Musically, the first half of Always Foreign finds them arriving at familiar destinations but taking far less time to get there. “I’ll Make Everything” builds towards a regal procession, “The Future” hits a pop-punk sprint at a four-minute mile pace. These would be codas on previous albums but now they’re the songs in themselves. The concision creates an illusory effect, putting the focus on what’s not there: No more desolate stretches of exhausted ambience, off-kilter sequencing, or fan trolling during the album leadup, which were all the sort of things that were often associated with the band when Shanholtzer was still in it.
Her absence is even more glaring given that she’s in the crosshairs for most of Side A. TWIABP has never written anything as flat out nasty as “Hilltopper” (“I hope evil can see this and you get what you deserve”), but even as an immensely satisfying and even necessary release—accurately described by the band as “R.E.M. on Dischord Records”—it’s hard to read anyone else’s story into it. TWIABP ensure that’s not the case even as the animus lingers throughout. The writing of Always Foreign coincided with both the exit of Shanholtzer and the election of Donald Trump, and it manages the exceedingly tough task of bringing unrelated personal and political trauma into a cogent polemic. The two converge during Bello’s accusatory midsection of “Marine Tigers”: “Can you still call it a country if all the states are broken/Can you still call it a business if all you do is steal?” As it progresses, Always Foreign implicates not just a specific person, but an entire capitalist system predicated on parasitic greed; Bello sings, “Making money is a horrible and rotten institution,” and it might as well have been the album title.
“Marine Tigers” shares its name with a recent memoir written by Bello’s father José, recounting the racism and hatred he faced after his migration from Puerto Rico to New York City in the 1940s. “Color seemed to be the stronger divider of people. It still is. In my child’s eye, it became clear that if I was going to hate a race, it would have to be the human race,” reads José’s epigram in the video. His son taps into that disillusion nearly 70 years later and finds it just as toxic. “You walk around the new neighborhood, but your heart’s not in it/To learn any more about this country/The apartment you had to live in.” This cultural queasiness never relents once and the song doesn’t bloom like all of their previous epics, it implodes with an indiscriminate blare of horns and drum rolls, an outburst of decades worth of repressed self- and societal-recrimination. His disdain spills over into “Fuzz Minor” a song that doesn’t even crest or crescendo, it simply pulsates with pure hate. “Call me A-rab, call me a spic, I can’t wait until I see you die” barely makes it out of the din and while it’s a blunt insult at an obvious target, such a wish feels like the only acceptable outcome for the current administration.
The impulses of Always Foreign makes for a disorienting initial listen—TWIABP have never been more immediately accessible or lyrically dense and challenging. Though only eight minutes shorter than Harmlessness, Always Foreign feels twice as compact. They’ve never written better pure pop than “The Future,” or anything as bare and emotional as the conflicted funeral song “For Robin,” or anything as adult-indie as “Gram,” which has the burnished, brassy splendor of a National track. But Bello’s impassioned, impressionist tale of West Virginia’s opioid epidemic is the polar opposite of Matt Berninger’s measured take on jejune domestic dramas.
TWIABP’s records alone are enough to justify their status as one of indie rock’s most exemplary, consistently rewarding bands of the past decade. But from the moment anyone says their name aloud for the first time, TWIABP asks, “Are you in or are you out?” and rewards full immersion with a steady stream of singles, EPs, well-intentioned and ambitious flops, inside jokes, Easter eggs, covers, special-run T-shirts and endless Twitter gags. While Always Foreign is by no means a happy record, it’s still a joy to listen to, driven by the same belief in community, evolution, and possibility that earned their debut EP the title of Formlessness. But their “us against the world” M.O. isn’t theoretical on Always Foreign. By keeping their friends close and their enemies as far as away as possible, their heaven on earth is smaller, but just as welcoming.
Correction: An earlier version of this article included a lyric whose meaning could be misinterpreted.
