The Lovechild of The Dillinger Escape Plan and Every Time I Die

Reflections and Review: Highly Irresponsible (2024) by Better Lovers

The Dillinger Escape Plan and Every Time I Die are two dissimilar bands in the hardcore scene; however, they’ve always shared a few similarities. They both bring creative takes to the table of hardcore and metalcore, with ETID mastering their music with a southern-inspired flair, and TDEP being the chaotic pinnacle of mathcore. They both disbanded while they were still making music well-regarded by both their fans and music critics. I’ve followed both bands for about a decade, and while I respect ETID and absolutely love their album Low Teens (2014), TDEP has become one of my favorite bands of all-time, with their release One of Us Is the Killer (2013) being in my top five favorite albums.

When TDEP disbanded after the release of Dissociation (2016), I was honestly pretty disappointed. At the time, my social anxiety would not allow me to attend concerts and it saddened me that I would probably never be able to see them live. It also saddened me that I would not be hearing anything new that they put out to the world. While I love many bands, TDEP spoke to me on a level that not many other groups could, and I found them to be the perfect mixture of melody and disorderly technique. And on a superficial level, I’m not one to become heavily infatuated with celebrities, yet something about Greg Puciato is irresistibly attractive, not just in his physical appearance but in the way he performs with such charisma and energy.

Before Better Lovers was formed, I had never expected a supergroup consisting of members from not only TDEP and ETID, but also from Fit for an Autopsy, which sounded way too good to be true. I found out about the project shortly after their first EP God Made Me an Animal (2023) came out, because as a fangirl I follow any project in which Greg Puciato takes part. I was so pleasantly surprised with this release consisting of four well-constructed aggressive and technical songs, all of them sounding manically wonderful on their own but flowing together as a whole. I couldn’t wait for them to make more. And then in late 2024, they released their first full-length album, Highly Irresistible.

It’s hard to talk about Better Lovers without mentioning any of the bands of which members were formerly a part, but I would describe this LP as the perfect blend of ETID and TDEP, which you can hear in songs like “Future Myopia.” Like ETID, the album in its entirety offers heavily southern-inspired metalcore, which is a sound you can hear prominently in the guitarwork, for example in “Deliver Us From Life.” However, Better Lovers mixes in some of the mathcore chaos of TDEP without going full-blown crazy like that band tends to do, which you can hear in “Superman Died Paralyzed.” And when you have a near-god like Greg solely doing the vocals, it all works together amazingly. Like the last two albums of TDEP, Better Lovers follows the same formula of combining catchy melodies sung by Greg accompanied by technical instrumentation as well as seemingly random musical disorder, though it is much more melodic than any full release TDEP has put out. Perhaps to some hardcore fans of either band, Better Lovers does not capture the same kind of magic that TDEP and ETID are able to do on their own, but I personally really like what they’re currently doing and find it enough to fill the hole in my heart that formed when TDEP stopped making music.

Because I was highly excited about this release, I could not resist myself from quickly recommending the band to my partner and one of my best friends. My friend is a fan of ETID, especially their guitarwork, so I knew he’d be interested in this release. My partner tried to get into TDEP in 2016 after hearing about Dissociation but their sound hadn’t clicked with him. Earlier this year, I tried once again to get him into the band and while he could recognize that they make quality music, they never really clicked with him. However, he easily got into Better Lovers, and it was easy to convince him to come to their concert with me later this month. I’m really excited to see this show (especially since Full of Hell, another band I enjoy, is an opener), and there is a huge chance of this album potentially becoming my favorite album of the year.