REVIEW: The World is a Beautiful Place & I Am No Longer Afraid to Die - Dreams of Being Dust

The terror of savagery, now you're coming back home

44:21 // August 22, 2025 // Epitaph Records

The World is a Beautiful Place & I Am No Longer Afraid to Die have managed to far outlast the vast majority of their late 2000s/early 2010s emo revival compatriots. This longevity might be due to the simple fact they’ve always been one of the finest examples of the scene, but it also comes down to an impressive instinct for sonic evolution. Setting aside their sprawling collection of EPs and split releases, the progression of their full-lengths tells a story. The first three LPs all utilized a post-rock-tinged emo sound, but each managed to capture a substantially different sense of atmosphere. From there, things have gotten weirder - a four year gap followed the last of those aforementioned early albums, the (rather unfairly) savaged Always Foreign, before the release of 2021’s Illusory Walls, a grandiose record which melded the band’s traditional tendencies with proggy and metallic elements while offering a sprawling meditation on the unsettling state of American society. And now here we are, four more years later, with Dreams of Being Dust, which marks another substantial reinvention.

In truth, this album is less of an enormous departure from the celebrated group’s back catalog than might be assumed from its lead single, “Beware the Centrist”. The decision to prepare listeners with that track was both a bold and a rather bizarre statement - not only does its brief dose of anger and energy come across as a rather generic offering from a third-rate hardcore band, but it’s totally unrepresentative of the sound of Dreams of Being Dust as a whole. Indeed, there’s no other song here that is particularly similar in style at all. Nonetheless, this record does find TWIABP&IANLATD manipulating a substantially heavier sonic canvas than ever before.

This last statement is true despite the fact that moments readily describable as hardcore and metalcore are few and far between - rather, most of the album’s runtime sees those influences infused into the pre-existing post-rock/emo stylings. At its best, this melding feels surprisingly innovative - rather than coming out as the frenetic helter-skelter energy of skramz, we find ourselves with a blend of twinkly beauty and earnest emo vox underlain by bleaker and more militant instrumentation. When the band goes beyond this curious fusion, though, things get more uneven. The aforementioned “Beware the Centrist” deservedly earns a lot of the criticism, but album centerpiece “Captagon” also suffers - punctuating its vision of inhuman futuristic warfare with a burst into full-on metallic territory which feels more uncomfortable than compelling in this band’s hands. More successful is the brooding closer “For Those Who Will Outlive Us”, etching a despondent mood which builds into churning heaviness, leaving the album on a powerful note.

The album’s most obvious stunners certainly don’t emerge from the most striking departures from this act’s normal style. Highlights include “Oubliette”, a soft and atmospheric piece which serves as a beautiful comedown between two of the heaviest numbers on the tracklist, “December 4th, 2024”, which is ominous and unrelenting but doesn’t feel too far from the TWIABP&ANLATD template, and “Auguries of Guilt”, a notably dark track which adheres more to the Illusory Walls model of prog-tinged epics interwoven with catchy melodies - it’s a true standout, but feels rather out of place here.

Even if I have my gripes with the direction taken and the inconsistent execution of this release, it’s fair to say that Dreams of Being Dust is an album which the band felt was necessary to make for this moment. Their more recent albums haven’t shied away from ample quantities of socio-political commentary - Always Foreign was peppered with virulent attacks against the excesses of the first Trump administration, and Illusory Walls took a more nuanced and personal assessment of an increasingly sclerotic system and the blighted state of America. Compared to either of those efforts, today’s context is far more sinister - daily news cycles displaying the ascendancy of ever-more overt fascism and forcing a reckoning with a country becoming unrecognizable before our eyes. Screaming your head off over louder riffs might not be the only way to respond to this whole fucking nightmare, but it’s certainly one option, and I’ll give TWIABP&IANLATD credit for giving it their all.

Still, Dreams of Being Dust is pretty easily the weakest of the band’s LPs. There’s something unwieldy about the whole tracklist’s construction - a mixture of full-throated attempts at an evolved sound, halfway gestures at a new approach, and tracks which nod back at previous eras of the band’s sound. In worse hands, I could see this record being a genuine disaster, but as it is, TWIABP&IANLATD remains self-evidently a great band and they bring their notable strengths to bear and redeem their fifth full-length, with the end result being a record far less coherent than might be hoped for, but certainly an interesting and often immensely engaging listen. Dreams of Being Dust is a worthy venture imbued with passion and spirit in a dark time, but I’ll expect to revisit it more for individual tracks than the full-album experience.

6.5/10