Album review: The World Is A Beautiful Place & I Am No Longer Afraid To Die – Dreams Of Being Dust

If you’ve only heard their ridiculously wordy name, you’d probably have pegged The World Is A Beautiful Place & I Am No Longer Afraid To Die as practitioners of either emo or post-rock. Indeed, these have been the two most significant components of their sound – until now, with the six-piece intuitively fashioning something much heavier on Dreams Of Being Dust.

Fuelled by personal tragedies and savage times, this fifth album is understandably dark in tone, but never feels too austere to engage. With its prog metal guitars and knife-edge dynamics, opener Dimmed Sun churns with a different energy to previous TWIABP work. Beware The Centrist, 104 seconds of roiling hardcore that scorches like Every Time I Die, is the sort of belter that hasn’t cropped up much across their catalogue, while December 4th, 2024, sounds like a sludgier Deftones dabbling in blackgaze.

Even tunes which cleave closer to classic fare, like the alt-rock of No Pilgrim or Dissolving’s dreamy noise, have a harder edge than usual, with founding member Josh Cyr’s bass commandingly crunchy throughout. Similarly, Se Sufre Pero Se Goza boasts graceful post-hardcore melody, but comes armour-plated by a feature from Counterparts singer Brendan Murphy.

Lead TWIABP vocalist David Bello delivers words wrapped in metaphor, occasionally reminiscent of Cedric Bixler’s free-thinking approach to lyrics in At The Drive-In, but it’s clear enough that death features heavily, not least on apocalyptic closer For Those Who Will Outlive Us. Ironically, the creative leaps taken on Dreams Of Being Dust mean that all this doom and gloom is no barrier to a curious positivity; hope found perfectly preserved in the ashes.

Verdict: 4/5

For fans of: Deftones, Cave In, Quicksand

Dreams Of Being Dust is released on August 22 via Epitaph