Review: Between the Buried and Me – The Blue Nowhere

Style: Progressive Metalcore, Progressive Metal, Jazz Fusion (Mixed Vocals)
Recommended for fans of: Mr. Bungle, Intronaut, Protest the Hero, The Human Abstract, The Dillinger Escape Plan, Thank You Scientist
Country: North Carolina, United States
Release date: 12 September 2025

For many children, Christmas Eve is the best night of the year. It’s one of those rare moments of eager anticipation of receiving something which—while unknown—is sure to be great. Your parents are going to buy you a bicycle, after all, not a box full of rocks. Christmas morning always hits. Waiting for a new album from a favourite band evokes a similar feeling of expectation, except every once in a while, you do get a box full of rocks.¹

With a band as talented and consistent as Between the Buried and Me, every new album release evokes that feeling of an out-of-control sports car speeding toward a ravine, wondering if they’re going to bridge the gap or fall into the valley of disappointment. To date, BTBAM have successfully landed on the other side of the valley each and every time, tires skidding, kicking up rocks and dust, cementing a legacy as one of the greatest progressive metal bands ever.²

The singles from BTBAM‘s latest album, The Blue Nowhere, certainly seemed to suggest that this would be another solid addition to their already formidable back catalog. “Things We Tell Ourselves in the Dark”, the first single and the first track on the album, is a microcosm of The Blue Nowhere: it’s a funky, jazzy piece, with mostly clean vocals, replete with synth stabs, wood block percussion, and clean, popping guitars, reminiscent of 90125-era Yes. And while the song begins solidly in jazz fusion territory, the straight rock beat of the chorus grounds the track somewhat—though what sounds like a straightforward 4/4 refrain is actually two bars of 8/8 and 7/8, that missing beat reminding you not to get too comfortable (this is BTBAM, after all). The middle of the track faultlessly transitions between crushing metalcore sections and clean, airy percussive ones, bringing us to the earliest bass drop of any BTBAM album, just six minutes in. We have arrived.

BTBAM have never been afraid to experiment, and like any musicians worth their weight, their sound has evolved over time. The oeuvre which began as the progressive-tinged metalcore of their eponymous debut album slowly evolved into the operatic, sometimes erratic work found in The Parallax II: Future Sequence and Coma Ecliptic. And while Colors II saw the band putting themselves back into the headspace of creating the seminal album for which it is a sequel, The Blue Nowhere follows a different kind of new-but-familiar tack. The technical virtuosity of old BTBAM remains, as does the willingness to mix and mash genres, but The Blue Nowhere has a greater emphasis on melody than almost any previous BTBAM release, and, believe it or not, a wider range of styles.

“God Terror”, the second track on the album, exemplifies this one-foot-in-each-camp mentality. The clanging industrial introduction brings us to a gurgling, bubbling verse not unlike a few of the heavier numbers off The Dear Hunter‘s The Color Spectrum (see “Filth and Squalor”, “This Body”).³ What sounds like a click track in the post-chorus section gives this song a sterile, mechanical quality, unlike anything in the band’s existing catalog. And while the straightforward, slower, heavier sections of this piece hearken back to Alaska-era BTBAM,⁴ the jumbled, synth-driven break in the middle kicks the listener off-balance yet again, tumbling them around like polka dot pajamas in a birthday clown’s front-loading washing machine. “God Terror” is undeniably BTBAM, but it’s also undeniably novel for the band.

Much of BTBAM‘s back catalog features abrupt transitions between sections: a favourite punching bag of negative reviewers. On The Blue Nowhere, the band more cohesively stitch these sections together, if not by smoothing out the dynamics between adjacent sections, then at least by providing thematic continuity across them. “Slow Paranoia” features both orchestral and metalcore sections, but even in the latter, there are echoes of the former, as the strings and percussion which move to the background are still very much present. In “Absent Thereafter”, a guitar lick is introduced in a rockabilly section of the song, carried over as-is into heavier sections, and echoed by keyboards in others. The Blue Nowhere is some of BTBAM‘s most melodic, and most compositionally mature work to date, featuring many examples of echoed phrasing like this, while also leaning heavily into the refrain on several tracks—such as “Absent Thereafter”, where a short chorus with the titular phrase is repeated at least six times. And just like any BTBAM album, The Blue Nowhere provides a tour of practically every musical genre that exists: surf rock, honky-tonk, flamenco, you name it.

More than any previous BTBAM release, The Blue Nowhere is an eminently singable album. Only a few listens into it, I found myself belting out “to all the old egos we’ve sold…” while driving, “wander alone, held by our own time…” while mowing the lawn, “Frozen by obsession!” while… you get the idea. “The Things We Tell Ourselves in the Dark” even has a verse-chorus pop structure. And on more than one track Tommy “la-dee-da”s his way through the lyrics, switching from clean to harsh “la-dee-da-dee”s on “Absent Thereafter”, which is a fun contrast of timbre and content. The Blue Nowhere contains some of the catchiest BTBAM to date.

Tommy Rogers⁵ explained in a recent interview that The Blue Nowhere “exists in a world that’s not tied to a storyline. It’s more about a feeling, where the songs live for me.” The songs appear to live in a hotel called The Blue Nowhere, and there are recurring themes of hallways and doors, but each individual song is fairly distinct, thematically, from the others. While there isn’t anything wrong with this approach per se, fans have come to expect a narrative arc from BTBAM. The Blue Nowhere meets this expectation halfway: there are cross-references between songs on this album,⁶ and there even appear to be melodic references to the band’s earlier work.⁷ An album full of disconnected songs may be fine for other groups, but it doesn’t cut the mustard for BTBAM: an album without a unifying theme, without melodic and rhythmic callbacks like those found in Parallax II just feels incomplete.

Paul Waggoner⁸ was recently asked to rank BTBAM‘s catalog; it’s no surprise that he put The Blue Nowhere at the top of the list. What might be surprising to fans, though, is how low he ranked 2007’s Colors on that list. Widely regarded as one of the band’s best albums, Paul is simply tired of playing it. Creating a great album is one thing, performing it identically countless times is another. The artistic desire to explore and reinvent oneself is so common as to be almost a cliché. So it’s no surprise that bands like BTBAM want to branch out and try new things. It’s a thin line to walk: to explore new ways of creating compelling art without alienating your existing fans. With The Blue Nowhere, BTBAM have done just that—they’ve created an album which explores new sonic territory, where each track is masterfully composed while maintaining the core elements of their signature sound. The Blue Nowhere may not be a new high water mark for the band, but it is a seriously strong album. If I could only pick one album to listen to while stuck in a timeless, infinite, liminal hotel, it would definitely be this one.

Recommended tracks: Things We Tell Ourselves in the Dark, Slow Paranoia, God Terror, Absent Thereafter
You may also like: Omnerod, Freighter, Pangaea, Rototypical, Luna’s Call
Final verdict: 8.5/10

Related links: Bandcamp | Official Website | Facebook | Instagram

Label: InsideOut – Bandcamp | Facebook | Official Website

Between the Buried and Me is:
– Tommy Rogers (vocals, keyboards)
– Paul Waggoner (guitars)
– Dan Briggs (bass, synth bass, keyboards)
– Blake Richardson (drums, percussion)

1. See: Lulu and Chinese Democracy, to name a couple. ↩︎
2. Truly ridiculous that they still do not appear in The Metal Archives. ↩︎
3. Whose influence appears later on The Blue Nowhere as well, in the second quarter of “Slow Paranoia”, where quiet strings, clarinets, and harpsichord (?) seem to dissolve and break off in chunks as the heavier side of BTBAM seeks to reassert itself. ↩︎
4. See: “Roboturner” ↩︎
5. Founder of and vocalist for BTBAM. ↩︎
6. “Beautifully Human”‘s lyrics include “the things we tell ourselves in the dark”. “Slow Paranoia” references “door number three”. ↩︎
7. The end of “Psychomanteum” has a near identical timbre and melody to Coma Ecliptic‘s “King Redeem / Queen Serene”. ↩︎
8. Founder of and guitar player for BTBAM. ↩︎