By Jonathan Sackett

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:: November 3, 2025

Post-rock captivates through its ability to pull the listener into a world of its own melancholy, near-nostalgia, and depth. It’s ethereal, yet accessible. The instrumentation primes and numbs your brain, pulling you into the album. Songs are best taken within their context, as a full project. These can be long, they can be short, but they are sure to make you imagine. 

The talons of post-rock sunk into me all the way back in middle school. My friend Sam played bass, had a band, and was probably the only eighth grader with niche music taste. This guy knew his shit. Suffice it to say, he put me on. Post-rock was escape. It titillated my imagination. Worlds, vast, distant and lonely, filled my mind. These abstractions of snowy mountain ranges, foggy woodlands, frosted lakes, and gloomy Victorians consumed me. It always was just nature and structure. 

Dreams of Being Dust changed that. 

Well, actually Swans changed that, but Dreams of Being Dust did it again. The world that pulled me in was complete: a broken cityscape for the broken people. 

Dreams of Being Dust, the latest album by rock band The World Is a Beautiful Place & I Am No Longer Afraid to Die (TWIABP), was a disgruntled fusion of metalcore, post-rock, and progressive emo. This project was a departure from the angstier, more mid-west emo-y sound that had been all but cemented by sophomore album Harmlessness a decade prior. 

Dark-grit usurps the bright of the past. From its opening, Dreams of Being Dust is unabashed in its departure from what came before. The distortion, the chugs, the fretboard tapping all coreless into a new type of post-rock. Instead of stagnating, TWIABP shifted. Their past couple of projects had strayed slightly from the path set by their freshman album Whenever, If Ever, yet they always seemed to yearn for something harsher. Dreams of Being Dust breaks off from the path entirely, and it’s better for it. 

Critics may disagree with me. Dreams of Being Dust is perhaps the most panned TWIABP album. But who cares what critics think? They don’t understand metalcore like I do. 

Dreams of Being Dust is dark while grounded in the “now.” The metal influences grate against the shifting vocalists. The guitars are plentiful and disjointed, the songs revel in their seeming insecurity. It’s a strong departure from the lyrical post-rock that had come to define TWIABP, maturation in an often immature genre. If you were at the Richmond Music Hall on Wednesday, you’d be sure to notice it. 

That’s why I’ve slept on this review for so long. Since Dreams of Being Dust released all the way back on August 22nd, my opinions haven’t changed. I’ve ostensibly had the review down since then. I knew what I wanted to write and how I would structure it. But, I wanted to wait for October 29, which marked the end of the North American leg of TWIABP’s tour.

The setlist was almost entirely pulled from TWIABP’s newest LP, but the closing song was a throwback: “Heartbeat in the Brain.” It’s their most popular track, and it’s from another time. 

You don’t need me to tell you it, but a lot can change in ten years — even more can change in twelve. The World Is is not what it was and, on this front, I’m glad.

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