The story goes that The World Is A Beautiful Place & I Am No Longer Afraid To Die’s band name was inspired by the repeated final lyrics to Neva Dinova’s 2005 song “I’ve Got A Feeling”: “The world’s a shitty place and I can’t wait to die.” Though the ever-changing Connecticut collective has regularly been lumped into the nebulous “emo revival” movement, their entire ethos — aside from, say, their shared admiration for Brand New or those shows they played with Algernon Cadwallader that one time — often seemed almost contradictory to what made emo “emo” in the first place. TWIABP, whether it came from a genuine place or they were just trying to convince themselves, evoked some sense of hope. Here’s the comically long-ass band name to prove it.
Nowhere is TWIABP’s cautious optimism more prevalent than on their sophomore album Harmlessness, which turns 10 years old today. In fact, that cautious optimism is probably why a second TWIABP album exists in the first place: The band members, or at least the majority of the whopping eight people in their studio lineup at the time, quit their day jobs to make 2013’s Whenever, If Ever, which, respectfully, is a crazy thing for an indie rock band to do for their debut album. A lot of TWIABP’s early emo associations probably came from the scorned wails of their then-vocalist, the late Tom Diaz, who amicably left the band due to medical issues just before they went on their first major tour.
Nobody would’ve blamed TWIABP for imploding right then and there. But in his place both on the road and on Harmlessness, TWIABP found a new lead vocalist in Dave Bello, whose delivery was much smoother, much prettier than most of their cigarette-crushing Epitaph labelmates. And though TWIABP’s lineup rotated constantly over the next decade and change, by some miracle, they never stopped.
Harmlessness, as a whole, is also much prettier than your typical 2010s “emo” record. It takes the sweeping violin of Whenever, If Ever crown jewel “Heartbeat In The Brain” — a song that proposed a welcome sonic expansion of what “emo” could be — and augments it into an hour-long opus. Harmlessness is TWIABP’s most ambitious record, their most challenging but rewarding listen, a collage of countless indie rock references. Opener “You Can’t Live There Forever,” for example, feels like a slightly jaded update of the White Stripes’ “We’re Going To Be Friends.” How that didn’t turn out corny as hell remains a mystery to me.
Meanwhile, “Rage Against The Dying Of The Light” is among TWIABP’s more explicit nods to early post-hardcore, while “The Word Lisa” is reminiscent of Los Campesinos! in its punchy pop hooks. Sure, you can hear that Brand New fanship on the sprawling headbanger “I Can Be Afraid Of Anything,” but TWIABP’s study of the art is most obvious on moments like “January 10th, 2014,” which reworks Explosions In The Sky’s dazzling post-rock, employs “Never Meant”-style noodly riffs, and bursts into a pop-punk coda, somehow all in under six minutes. Since its release, Harmlessness has also consistently drawn comparisons to albums like How It Feels To Be Something On or The Moon And Antarctica, which is to say that Harmlessness, too, occupies the Venn diagram-overlap between Midwest emo and Northwest indie rock. And yet, for as many bands as TWIABP might remind you of in any given moment, Harmlessness is arranged so effectively that it also sounds like none of them.
Harmlessness would be pretty good as an instrumental album. It’s textured, vivid, and complex, impeccably high-fidelitous but not overpolished. It’d be cool to see TWIABP attempt a full-length instrumental record one day — they already dabbled in spoken word with 2014’s Between Bodies EP — but we’d sure be missing out on a lot if Harmlessness was an instrumental album. Its narrators are in the trenches, grasping for encouragement where they can find it, and these songs are written with a scope that very few of TWIABP’s peers could touch.
Any band could pluck a true crime snapshot from history to reinterpret into song, but that song likely wouldn’t be nearly as moving as “January 10th, 2014.” It bestows the real story of the Mexican woman nicknamed “Diana, Huntress Of Bus Drivers,” who in 2013 shot dead two bus drivers on consecutive days in Juárez. Her murders were supposedly in retaliation for years of unprosecuted violence upon hundreds of female public transit passengers in the city, many of whom were left for dead in ditches off the road, brutally mutilated to the point of unidentifiability.
On the song, co-vocalist/keyboardist Katie Dvorak exchanges lines with Bello, the pair respectively assuming the roles of vengeful woman and anxiety-ridden man. “How great that someone’s doing what many of us should have done,” Dvorak ponders as the entire band swells around her, before asking: “Are you afraid of me now?” Bello responds: “Well, yeah, shouldn’t I be?” What could’ve resulted as just a theatricized anecdote of sexism in the hands of a lesser band instead becomes a thought-provoking deliberation on the role — and sometimes necessity — of violence. In Mexico, the song’s “Diana” became a folk hero of sorts, the case still unsolved. Listening to “January 10th, 2014” today, I can’t help but draw parallels to the stories of slain CEOs, legislators, and fascist podcasters that have dotted US history in the past year, and who among them gets to be crowned a martyr.
Years before progressive young Americans would be radicalized by the government’s mishandling of COVID-19, Derek Chauvin’s murder of George Floyd, and Israel’s genocide of Palestinians, Harmlessness seemed to anticipate the cognitive dissonance of navigating a revolution. I sure hope the members of TWIABP weren’t envisioning things would become like this a decade into the future, but it’s almost jarring how applicable the lyrics of Harmlessness can be in 2025: “Ra Patera Dance,” which borrows its name from a volcano on one of Jupiter’s satellites, seems to reckon with feelings of helplessness amid persistent tragedy: “Can you tell we’re taking all advice on how to leave marks?” Bello asks over leaden guitar chugs. “Today we are superheroes, but tonight we’ll just be tired.”
But Harmlessness succeeds in that it doesn’t surrender to full debilitation — that would defeat its purpose — but is empathetic to those tempted by it. “Don’t worry if what you say is a quote from older days,” goes one of the more memorable lines on the acoustic “Mental Health,” before offering a gentler alternative to a snarky “Google is free” clapback: “When in doubt, just look it up.” Willful ignorance, TWIABP seem to say, is a meager excuse that goes hand-in-hand with displaced self-pity. “You are normal and healthy to forgive yourself,” Bello reminds us on “Mental Health,” a sentiment he also expresses on “Rage Against The Dying Of The Light,” a lightly math-y highlight that somehow finds the thematic common ground between Dylan Thomas and Zack De La Rocha. “Sharing a meal at a table your friends built,” he imagines in its victorious outro, the table an apparent metaphor for community care and the meal being whatever you need it to be.
It’s certainly not a coincidence that the photo on the cover of Harmlessness, at a glance, is similar to that of TWIABP’s debut. The cover of Whenever, If Ever is a photo of a boy, his back facing the camera, jumping into a still body of water that’s nearly as green as the trees surrounding it. The cover of Harmlessness, however, blurrily depicts an anonymous blonde woman running through a lush forest towards the camera, though she’s looking over her shoulder as a man in a bear costume races after her. It’s unclear if the chase is meant to be playful or threatening, and maybe that ambiguity is exactly the point. In 2019, TWIABP released Assorted Works, a compilation of rarities featuring a photo presumably from the Harmlessness cover shoot. The woman is in focus, centered perfectly in frame. She’s holding the bear mask. She’s unharmed. She’s won.
