The World Is A Beautiful Place & I Am No Longer Afraid To Die: Breaking The Wall

Write a record. Release it. Tour it. Repeat. It’s an endless cycle every man and his dog in the music industry is locked into like cogs in a machine. With the digital age doubling demand and streaming services intensifying activity, logging off and hitting the hay at home for a while is easier said than done. Only, that’s exactly what post-rock collective THE WORLD IS A BEAUTIFUL PLACE & I AM NO LONGER AFRAID TO DIE did. Breaking the habit of recording a record and hitting the road every two years wasn’t part of the plan, but a global pandemic put things into focus for a band who desperately needed it.

“We needed some space because it was so non-stop for years, like from 2012 to 2017, we was constantly on tour and home for like a few weeks at a time and that’s totally cool, but it wears on you,” admits guitarist and producer Chris Teti. “It was certainly stressful but we needed to have a little bit of a reset, even though I feel like in that time people probably thought we broke up.”

In all honesty, breaking up would’ve been an easier way out for TWIABP&IANLATD – completed by bassist Josh Cyr, drummer Steven Buttery, keyboardist and vocalist Katie Dvorak and vocalist David Bello. Endless cycles can take their toll on your artistic integrity as non-stop touring taxes your mental health.

Breaking points meant breaking habits rather than breaking up, with a little help from a global pandemic that put a stop to performing live. Four years on from their third album Always Foreign and THE WORLD IS A BEAUTIFUL PLACE & I AM NO LONGER AFRAID TO DIE have returned with Illusory Walls. Rome wasn’t built in a day and closing song Fewer Afraid took the same amount of time to write and record as it did their entire third album. Regardless, they’ve made the album of their career – combining post-rock ambition with their Midwest-emo roots, they’ve painted a paranoia-filled picture of modern life.

Almost ironically, Illusory Walls as a title reflects the feelings that fill it’s eleven tracks. It takes a couple of google searches for Chris to get it right, but it’s named after a Dark Souls reference vocalist David Bello is a big fan of meaning “illusory walls are surfaces that appear solid but are in reality illusions, and illusory walls serve to conceal entrances or objects such as chests or bonfires, like okay, a player can go through that fake wall to reveal what lies behind him.”

Whilst gaming isn’t quite Chris’ forte, the idea of Illusory Walls extended far beyond the Kingdom of Lordran to making the record itself. Despite having all the time in the world to get it right, the mental blocks Chris had to bulldoze through to get it finished felt overwhelmingly impossible.

“I took it in a different way from what David meant, because we had this four-year gap between Always Foreign and this record and it felt super daunting to even try and do another record,” Chris explains exhaustingly. “It felt like there was a wall and you couldn’t get through it to actually do another record – I couldn’t fucking sleep because of it!”

If counting sheep is something most of us do when we can’t sleep, conquering illusory walls was Chris’ task as his band began to shape a record he was at the helm of around him. Ultimately, he overcame it through sheer perseverance and sleep deprivation.

“Anytime we had writing sessions, I would be stressed out and I feel like if I fucked this up, I fucked it up for everybody because I’m producing it so it’s like, I’m putting my name on the record and if it’s a flop, it’s my fucking fault” he explains, a solemn sense of seriousness permeating the laughter in his voice, before adding, “I didn’t think it was possible but in the end, once we got into crossing that big threshold or wall, it was like ‘oh, no, we can do all of these things’ and like, sure, let’s have these ridiculous 15 and 20 minute songs.”

And thank god they fought through the noise inside their heads. The two songs Chris mentions close out the record under the guise of Infinite Josh (a spiritual sequel to Infinite Steve from Always Foreign) and Fewer Afraid. Together, they total thirty-five minutes – that’s how long the remaining nine tracks are altogether. Whilst the former explores the difficulties of dementia and the existentialism of getting it, the latter is their entire career diluted into a twenty-minute magnum opus. For something so complex, it came about from a conversation with a completely different band.

“I did a record in early 2020 with a band called FIDDLEHEAD and I remember talking to their singer Pat and he mentioned ‘oh, doesn’t THE WORLD IS A BEAUTIFUL PLACE & I AM NO LONGER AFRAID TO DIE have a 20 minute song’ and I think our longest one might actually be seven or eight minutes,” he remembers, laughing at the self-fulfilling nature of it all, continuing. “Coincidentally we got together in February of 2020 and we had a 20 minute song come together and I’m just like ‘holy shit, how did that happen?’”

If Illusory Walls truly is an illusion, behind this surface is a deeply compelling, emotionally complex masterpiece from a band who’ve slipped under the radar for far too long. Perhaps it’s time we all take a leaf out of THE WORLD IS A BEAUTIFUL PLACE & I AM NO LONGER AFRAID TO DIE’s book and break our habits.

Illusory Walls is out now via Epitaph Records.

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