What emerges in Dreams of Being Dust is music that flickers, flares, and ultimately endures in ways both unexpected and true.
Release date: August 22, 2025 | Epitaph Records | Website | Facebook | Bandcamp | Purchase/Stream
With the 24/7 news cycle constantly one-upping itself day after day with something either depressing as all hell or comedically pathetic, I find the only way to maintain a sliver of sanity in today’s day-and-age is to disconnect and immerse myself in the things that make (my) life worth living; those things being my family and religiously listening to music. To elaborate, the people that I surround myself with, as well as kind strangers that I run into out in the ‘wild’, reassure me on a daily basis that there are so many genuinely kind and warm people out there (the outspoken minority speaks the loudest after all). With music, I get an escape and an opportunity to learn from others lived experiences told through lyrics, providing myself with empathy and a deep philosophy that eventually helped me come to terms with my own mortality. Together, the people in my life and my obsession with music act as daily reminders that the harsh world we live in is actually a beautiful place and that I’ve made my peace with the inevitability of death, respectively (hmm, something along those lines would go hard as a hypothetical band name, don’t you think?). Anyways, the horrors persist but so do I, purely out of spite.
Hold on a second, my totally original and creative idea for a band name has already been claimed by someone else? Emotional damage. While The World Is A Beautiful Place & I Am No Longer Afraid To Die as a badass, philosophical band name is no longer up for grabs and hasn’t been for quite some time, thankfully the music that they make is far beyond what I could ever create myself (that is a low bar honestly) so I’ll respectfully take this L. Now, let’s talk some music, shall we?
Ever since their inception with the release of Whenever, If Ever, they had an instantly recognizable personality and core sound that the band would carry over to each and every successive work. What differs across their releases are the stylistic ‘dressings’ that define each era of their discography. Regardless of what musical dressing The World Is… choose to generously lather all over their songs, not only do they excel at the execution, but the music is still unapologetically them through and through. Typically, one (execution vs identity) comes at the cost of the other and that trend certainly doesn’t start on Dreams of Being Dust. Nor do I expect it to ever occur with this special band.
Unbeknownst to anyone yet also completely understandable given the current political climate of the world, they would even further embrace the heaviness dabbled with on Illusory Walls by turning it from a two to a seven on Dreams of Being Dust; it isn’t the ’seven’ itself that is impressive but rather the jump up to it. The first ten seconds of “Dimmed Sun” that immediately kicks off the album genuinely made me think that the wrong music file got uploaded to distribution services in place of whatever I thought I may have expected from new The World Is… material. Despite the singles being far from subtle in indicating that things were going to get spicy on the new album, I still wasn’t expecting that. Not long after that balls-to-the-wall intro, their trademark tapping riff comes in and I’m like ‘oh yeah, this is totally them.’
Speaking of the singles, I admittedly wasn’t crazy (at first) about these tracks as they led up to the full album release. With the exception of “Auguries of Guilt” (a more ‘traditional’ track by their standards), the other songs were incredibly brief and felt as if they were done just as they had started. Yet in the context of the full album, the existence and placement of said songs made perfect sense in how they were sandwiched between other contrasting tracks, in length and stylistic focus. Thus, only then was I able to properly appreciate them given the context of the rest of the album. Generally, I don’t even bother with singles for this very reason, but it isn’t every day that The World Is… releases new music so I had to indulge myself the moment I could.
With as many playthroughs as I have on the record, I now fully anticipate Brendan Murphy’s (Counterparts, END) feature on “Se Sufre Pero Se Goza” and even moreso, Mike Sugars’ (Church Tongue) blistering display on “Captagon”. The galloping chugs are beefier than a twelve pack of beefy five-layer burritos and get the adrenaline flowing like no other with the abstract bridge/drum fill leading into the final chorus-but-not-a-chorus. While these heavier moments stand out the most on the record because they are a good bit (but not entirely!) out of the band’s musical wheelhouse, we cannot let that overshadow the rest of the amazing moments found on Dreams of Being Dust.
I’m incredibly partial to the long form, linear tracks that The World Is… is known to put together, which are always their closing movements. Out of all their songs, my personal favorites are the one-two combo of “Infinite Josh” and “Fewer Afraid” off of Illusory Walls. Naturally, “For Those Who Will Outlive Us” (a subtle reference to Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 I’d like to think) cemented itself alongside those as yet another favorite of theirs. This particular track is an adventure in itself, with mysteriously haunting synth-work, the utterly satisfying vocal harmonies, and last but not least the cataclysmic climax leading into the heaviest moment in the whole damn record. I certainly didn’t have The World Is… dropping the filthiest breakdown of 2025 on my bingo card, yet here we are.
For as many expectations I had on new The World Is… material, I should’ve known better than to expect something specific from them. They’ve made it obvious time and time again that unpredictability is part of their charm, and that’s what makes the listening experience on any record of theirs, not excluding Dreams of Being Dust, so rewarding. I’ve been burned enough times placing blind trust in other bands, but with this group of musical magicians (calling them a band simply doesn’t do them justice), it feels less like trust and more like recognition that they know who they are, and they’ve stayed more than true to that and the emotionally burdensome times that we all live in today. With a name as singular and unforgettable as theirs, it was naïve to think they’d ever lose that spark, as Dreams of Being Dust is a reminder of why I keep crawling back to their mystique.
