Review: The World Is a Beautiful Place and I Am No Longer Afraid to Die – Dreams of Being Dust

Album art by Triple Dog Studio

Style: Progressive metal, emo, hardcore (mixed vocals)
Recommended for fans of: Foxing, Touché Amoré, Chat Pile, Deftones
Country: US – Connecticut
Release date: 22 August 2025

It’s a commonly observed trend for formerly heavy bands to mellow with age. From Opeth trading their growls for Mellotrons to Anathema becoming so un-metal they were practically a noble gas, plenty of artists have grown past the angry, violent energy of their youth and sought out gentler, more sonically expansive genres that aren’t so hard on the ol’ joints. But The World Is a Beautiful Place and I Am No Longer Afraid to Die (henceforth abbreviated as TWIaBP for obvious reasons) have never been the sort of band to follow trends. After spending the 2010s becoming perhaps the flagship band of the decade’s emo revival movement, they would take an abrupt swing into progressive metal with 2021’s Illusory Walls, complete with distorted odd-meter riffs, sci-fi synthscapes, and track lengths sprawling past the fifteen-minute mark. And though it was a long-winded, scattershot record whose experiments didn’t always work, its sheer ambition in recontextualizing the classic TWIaBP sound into something grander and more dynamic showed that the last thing the band wanted to do was rest on their laurels. But after something that massive and multifaceted, the question of what to do next becomes an unusually open one, with every new genre twist representing a brand new signpost upon a convoluted crossroads. Now, four years later, which road has follow-up Dreams of Being Dust taken?

If you guessed “aggro, pissed-off metal and hardcore”, then you’re either clinically insane, taking a wild guess, or you’ve looked at the genre tags on this review, because as the very first salvo of abrasive feedback on opener “Dimmed Sun” demonstrates, TWIaBP are entirely through fucking around. From the fierce roars over pummeling riffs in “Captagon” to the screaming, teeth-bared hardcore assault that is “Beware the Centrist”, calling this the heaviest album in their discography is akin to calling the Sun the heaviest object in the solar system. At first blush, this may seem like they’ve taken all the wrong lessons from their experimentations with metal in Illusory Walls – sure, those bits were an entertaining pinch of spice in moderation, but too flimsy and unconvincing to serve as a full album’s backbone. Credit where it is due, though, the band do step up quite admirably on the technical front. Chris Teti’s overwhelming, sledgehammering guitar tone and intentionally oppressive production do a great deal toward selling the heaviness of it all, and Steven Buttery, already one of emo’s most underrated drummers, is set loose to pummel the absolute bejeezus out of his kit. As a compression of their signature sprawling maximalism into a dense, 44-minute slab of metallic aggression, this ain’t half bad.

Still, Dreams of Being Dust isn’t all raw screams and pit-ready breakdowns; in fact, a solid amount of the record still draws from the melodic emo of the band’s heyday, albeit with a significantly heavier array of guitars and synths backing it up. Unfortunately, it’s in these calmer sections that the album feels most like a step down. Simply put, in their efforts to maintain the album’s resolutely bleak tone, TWIaBP have sucked most of the life out of their melodies, leaving them feeling dehydrated and limp. Take the way “Dissolving” just sort of sits on one note for its refrain, or the way the floaty, soporific vocal lines in the otherwise excellently atmospheric “Oubliette” can’t quite commit to a major key. I get that the album isn’t exactly meant to sound pretty the way their previous work was, but that’s no excuse for parts of it sounding this dull.

It doesn’t help that both of the band’s primary singers give oddly phoned-in clean vocal performances throughout. Katie Dvorak’s previously bright soprano sounds bored to the point of lobotomization here, particularly evident in tracks like “Reject All and Submit”. And while David Bello’s distinct nasality was part of the charm back in TWIaBP‘s softer emo days, their new metal direction makes his cleans feel oddly whiny and sarcastic in context, particularly next to the earnest rage of his shouts. Thankfully, there are a couple of moments towards the end of the album whose singing still imparts the same amount of heft as the band’s best work, with “Auguries of Guilt” featuring Bello delivering some genuine venom and closer “For Those Who Will Outlive Us” using his sleepy vocals as the buildup to a genuinely powerful climax. Still, it feels like too little, too late.

Of course, there’s an easy explanation for why Dreams of Being Dust is the way it is – it’s simply a reaction to the state of the world right now, an angry album for angry times. And indeed, Bello is still quite evocative as a wordsmith, whether taking direct aim at current events such as the broken US healthcare system (“December 4th, 2024”)¹ and the Palestinian genocide (“Auguries of Guilt”), or more distant visions of apocalypse (“Dimmed Sun”, “For Those Who Will Outlive Us”). But no matter how many images he spins forth of tarp-covered wastelands and destroyed olive groves, it all starts to feel a bit… numbing. Even 2017’s Always Foreign², a similarly concise, pissed-off record reacting in part to the election of a certain spray-tanned fascist, balanced its vitriol with numerous moments of beauty and optimism. Here, though, the emotional spectrum runs all the way from “Enraged screaming about how everything sucks” to “Quiet, resigned groaning about how everything sucks”. And, look, I get it. Paying attention to today’s headlines is enough to make most folks want to scream into a pillow until they run out of air. But people don’t need any more help feeling angry – they need help realizing that, as a great band once said, “The world is a beautiful place, but we have to make it that way.” Shame that band doesn’t seem to be around anymore.

Recommended tracks: Beware the Centrist, Captagon, Auguries of Guilt, For Those Who Will Outlive Us
You may also like: Breaths, Vower, Asunojokei
Final verdict: 5.5/10

Related links: Bandcamp | Official Website | Facebook | Instagram

Label: Epitaph – Bandcamp | Facebook | Official Website

The World Is a Beautiful Place and I Am No Longer Afraid to Die is:
– David Bello (vocals)
– Katie Dvorak (synths, vocals)
– Chris Teti (guitars, backing vocals, production)
– Anthony Gesa (guitars, backing vocals)
– Joshua Cyr (bass)
– Steven Buttery (drums, percussion)
With guests:
– Greg Thomas (additional guitars, vocals, and production)
– Brendan Murphy (vocals on “Se Sufre Pero Se Goza”)
– Mike Sugars (vocals on “Captagon”)
– Dylan Walker (vocals on “Reject All and Submit”)

1. Named after the date when United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson was killed. Also a reference to classic-era TWIaBP song “January 10th, 2014”, which is likewise a tale of vigilante justice. ↩︎
2. On that album was “For Robin”, a song that contrasted the tragic yet distant passing of Robin Williams, a celebrity, with deaths of people Bello actually knew. Its commentary on the impact of personal tragedies versus those of society at large feels oddly apropos as to why this album’s treatment of broader societal ills doesn’t hit as hard as the smaller-scale, close-to-home melancholy of their earlier work. ↩︎