The World is a Beautiful Place & I Am No Longer Afraid to Die have a new album out this week. LP number five, Dreams of Being Dust, highlights the evolution the band has undergone over more than fifteen years. There have been lineup changes, and each album has brought a fresh sonic perspective to their sound.

A big part of this ongoing musical growth comes from Chris Teti, who not only plays guitar in the band but has also been the main producer for all of their work since Harmlessness. On Dreams of Being Dust, TWIABP delivers their heaviest, most politically charged work yet, creating moments that are both powerful and, at times, terrifying.

I sat down with Teti to explore the background and process behind this album while also digging into the band’s history a bit.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Ricky Adams @ The Needle Drop: Can you please introduce yourself?

Chris Teti: My name is Chris Teti, I play guitar in The World Is a Beautiful Place & I'm No Longer Afraid to Die. I used to play trumpet, but I don't really do horn stuff anymore, which is cool with me. I've also produced a lot of our discography dating back to a little after when I joined the band. I joined the band in 2011, and the first thing I produced for the band was our song “Beverly Wyatt” on our four-way split that came out around 2012 or 2013. That was with Self Defense Family, Tiger’s Jaw, and Code Orange Kids. Producing the records and stuff has been my role ever since about then. So I guess I have a particular attachment to everything, maybe in a deeper way than one might normally, because I'm in on it from the ground floor until the end. It's one of my favorite projects to work on, and it's why I've been so passionate about it over the years and stuck with doing that.

As a band, do you approach recording the same way today as you did 15 years ago, or has that process shifted? You all don’t live in the same area anymore, do you?

No. We used to all live in Connecticut, pretty much, maybe with one or two people in the general area. We're spread out, but not too far. Our drummer lives in Burlington, Vermont. A couple of other members live in Providence, Rhode Island. A couple of other members live in Philly. I'm in Connecticut, obviously, but it's not too bad of a spread. It's East Coast, Northeast-ish.

I think over the years, recording, especially with the band, has changed. I think the attention to detail has risen a lot on just the writing aspect, or especially the recording end for me. It's funny, I was going back through tracks for our second LP, Harmlessness, which was the first full-length I fully produced and mixed for the band. As I was going through it, I was like, oh man, there's a couple of things I would have cleaned up in some of these tracks. There's a cool character to it, but I was like, oh damn. I learned a lot over the past even 10 years, recording-wise. But there's a charm to some of the older stuff. It's all a learning process, and they're snapshots into our lives.

Now when we record, what started around COVID with our previous LP, Illusory Walls, it doesn’t have to be the entire band in at all times while we're recording. Of course, back in the day, there were some sessions that not everyone would be there for. But for the most part, a lot of it would usually be the whole band in the studio for three, four weeks at a time. There’s something cool with that, but not everybody’s doing something that entire time. It’s a waste for some people to just be like, oh, I was there for three weeks and I tracked for five days.

Now people come in separately to do their parts on the record. I think it's cool. There might be a few people here while that’s happening, but I think it's cool because people can just have their own zone to focus on their stuff, what they need to do on the record, and there's less distraction. It used to be like you'd have six other people in the room and everybody's being loud watching Billy Madison or something, but it takes you out of it. You're like, I want to focus on this actual serious thing I'm doing right now.

I think it's been cool that we can have people come in on their own time, focus on their parts themselves, and really be able to hone that in. That's the easiest way I could put it. And spending some more time on tracking the records.
The budget for our first LP, Whenever, If Ever, was absolutely horrible. It was $1,200, which even at that time wouldn't even get you much studio time. The band actually fronted a lot of money towards the recording. I think the label who originally released that record might have reimbursed us for some of it. I was pretty much doing sessions for free at my spot to add stuff. But it was, I don’t know, a couple of weeks of tracking in total. I did all my guitars for the majority of the record within eight hours, whereas now I’ll spend a whole day on my guitars just for one song. I like that. I can focus on that now.

A lot of publications are pointing out how much heavier this new record feels. Was that a conscious group decision, or did it come about more naturally in the writing process?

I think it was a pretty organic thing. To us, it felt pretty seamless, and I think some friends of ours who’ve been really close with us throughout the years have messaged me when they’ve heard the singles, and they’re like, oh, this makes total sense, knowing you personally, knowing you all personally, and having talked to you throughout the years and seeing us on tours and stuff. But there was some heavier stuff on Illusory Walls, and we’ve had hints of it.

Honestly, I was touring with just a baritone for the Harmlessness album cycle and for the Always Foreign record cycle. I had a lot of baritone parts on those, but I feel like it might not have come across necessarily as more heavy at the time. I feel like there was some sense of us being afraid to just commit to certain stuff like that. I felt like Always Foreign was like, it was like a fun record, and it’s a cool snapshot into our lives then. But it didn’t fully commit to the moments that we thought may have been heavy at the time. It was like a middle ground. We were in between like, do we want to be an indie rock band? We don’t feel like we’re an emo band. It had hints of those things, but I feel like on this one we were like, okay, it’s the fifth LP, fuck it. Absolutely, we can have a song in drop G. It just came naturally, and I think our live sets have gotten more energetic and the presentation of the songs has gotten heavier in more recent years.

Honestly, 10 years ago the live presentation of the songs was fine, but we probably didn’t move around much. I feel like now we’re all better musicians and there’s a lot more energy to it. Stuff just naturally ended up a little heavier, or the presentation of it ended up that way anyway. And we all like a wide variety of music, and we’ve taken heavier bands than us out on tour. I think this record fits a little more to our tastes currently. It just was a natural thing, and we also wanted a shorter record. Our previous record was like 70 minutes, something fucking crazy like that. Now it was like, can we try to not have seven-minute songs?

The one other thing I’ll add is that the first and last songs on the record were specifically written for a split with a heavier band. We were supposed to do a split with a much heavier band. The first song on the record was specifically written to be as crazy as we could be, I guess, to try to outdo that heavy band. It wasn’t meant for the record. For being on a split it was like, oh, we could do whatever we want, it doesn’t matter, it’s a couple of songs on a split. You can get away with weird experimentation. Then the split didn’t come together, and we decided to add those to the record, we were like, oh, these would function amazing as the first and last song. We can write around it, and it all started to fit into place.

Our drummer Steve, he was always like, we should start a record with a blast beat. It would be crazy to start a record with a blast beat. I want to start a record with a blast beat. We never did it. It just never made sense. We’d always do these slow builds into a record, like, oh, how cinematic can we make it? Then with this we’re like, fuck it. Here’s noise and a blast beat. You get it. Fifth LP.

Early on, The World Is was often grouped into the "emo revival" movement, even though you’ve said that wasn’t really your intent. Do you feel that label still applies to your music today, and how would you describe your sound now?

The emo revival thing is funny because I played in a band called My Heart to Joy before World Is. It was on Topshelf Records. Speaking of emo, emo revival, I think people should check out the LP for that band, Seasons in Verse, because I think that’s one of the best emo, emo revival-adjacent records to come out from that period. I feel like I can say that because I joined the band right when they finished recording it, and that was my favorite band at the time. Those were my friends from high school. We loved Rainer Maria and The Promise Ring. That was our bread and butter, all the emo stuff.

We played shows with Algernon Cadwallader. The first Touche Amore East Coast shows were with my old band playing with them. We shared a practice space with The Saddest Landscape, a screamo/emo band. That was our thing, and I loved it. There were tons of those emo revival bands early on that we played with, and that was our friend group.

When I joined World Is, it was me and our drummer Steve. Steve was in My Heart to Joy at the very end, then joined World Is. Our old guitarist Greg was also in My Heart to Joy with me. When we went into World Is, at least Greg and I, I remember us talking about it and we were like, oh, it’s like, we thought of it as an indie pop band or a post-rock indie band. We didn’t think of it as an emo band because we were like, oh, there’s synth. Everything adjacent to us was like emo revival, and I think we got lumped into it a little.

But I love those bands and those people. I can’t disparage it because literally Sunny Day Real Estate is one of my favorite bands of all time. I love that stuff. Anyways, I think coming from that, being knee-deep in the beginnings of emo revival stuff, all those bands, literally the stupid term “twinkle daddies” or “twinkle daddy,” that was started by my old band. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen that term, but that’s an emo revival term that people started using. My old band came up with that. That was us.

It’s funny because when Harmlessness came out, Ian Cohen wrote a whole piece about how this is the end of emo revival, this is not an emo revival record. At the time we were like, that’s fucking sick. He understands it. We weren’t trying to get categorized into one little thing. It’s like the bane of every band’s existence. You can get thrown into a cool scene that gets a lot of attention, but then in hindsight you’re just looked at in comparison to that scene and those bands, and that wasn’t our only thing.

That’s partly why even Dreams of Being Dust has less linear song structure. We’re not a prog band. Never were a prog band. There was some influence for sure on some of that stuff, but it’s such a mishmash of stuff that I just feel like, I don’t know, it’s just not what it is.

There’s a strong emotional pull in the artwork for Dreams of Being Dust. Was there a particular narrative or idea you wanted to capture with it?

The story of the album cover is basically, during the recording process, our singer’s father passed away. Our singer’s father had come to see us so many times. David’s father was awesome. We had a song dedicated to him for a book that he had written. The song “Marine Tigers” on Always Foreign was about Dave’s family and his father immigrating here, growing up in Puerto Rico, and then growing up in New York City and being interested in immigrant neighborhoods. He’s been very special to us, and Dave is very close with his parents. Countless times, his parents have come out to see us when we’ve been around them.

His father passed away during the recording process, which was less than a year ago. Dave was at his parents’ house. They were going through old photos, and he found a couple of photos of his father when he was younger. Dave proposed the idea of using a photo of his father for the album cover. That photo is the one of his father when he was younger. It’s one of the two photos on the cover. His dad is younger, and there are telephone lines and poles, a field, and a dirt road. That was what was originally proposed. But what Dave showed us was a photo of two photos on a table, and the other photo in that cell phone camera shot was the other photo that ended up on the cover. At first, everybody was like, oh yeah, let’s use that one photo of Dave’s dad. The cover would just be that one photo, black and white. I was very opposed to black and white covers, at least for us. It works for certain bands, but I thought there could be more to it than that. I really pushed for some color to be incorporated and to have both photos because I felt like they told a story.

Probably to the annoyance of everybody in the band initially, I was like, I really believe it should be the two photos. We had the idea of the album title already, and we already had themes coming together for the album lyrically. Maybe the majority of the vocals were recorded by that point, but I was like, this tells, I hate to say it, but this tells a story. It needs something. The first photo felt too reminiscent of Always Foreign. I didn’t want people to think they were supposed to be associated. There’s some callback to it, but this is not the point.

I was so stressed out. I was literally losing my mind as we were rehearsing for the Harmlessness anniversary shows. I was really trying to figure out how to incorporate the two photos. I started going through a ton of old albums. There’s a folder on my phone for my Dropbox called “cover ideas” that I sent to the artist. We did a super collaborative thing. The artist, Jacob at Triple Dog Studio, is super cool about this and working together with me on this. I gave him references, which included some emo covers. I do like that stuff, and I wanted to pull from 90s alt stuff, which was also a big influence for us on this record, 90s alt emo-leaning stuff. You have stuff from the early 2000s, but also bands like Rival Schools, Quicksand, Failure, more rock bands, but still respected among people who like emo and that scene.

I sent all of these to Jacob while he was doing the cover. We went through a bunch of revisions, because at first he just had a certain crop. I was like, no, it needs a thing. It needs a thing. I was like, it can’t be green. I don’t want green. I pushed for green with Illusory Walls; that was the closing of that era. He figured out how to use blues because I was like, I want blues or reds or purple. The way he figured it out was awesome. When we were on tour in Europe in May, I was going back and forth with him on the final adjustments. I was looking up the back cover of Radiohead’s OK Computer, checking how they laid out the text, all this stuff. It was fun.

Another topic that publications have pointed out is how political this album feels. The lyrics make that clear as well. Is there a central theme or takeaway you hope listeners get from the project? I noticed the concept of "dust" appears in the title and in several lyrics. How do you see that idea resonating for yourself or for others?

When the title for the record got proposed to us, I was like, holy shit, this is awesome. I think it was proposed by Dave, our singer. He always puts together these very deep Google documents for his lyrics with citations. I’ve said this in some other interviews, so I am repeating myself a little here, but I have to give credit where credit is due to him because he’ll cite things like a college paper. He has a master’s degree. I think Dave is brilliant. I know I’m biased because he’s the singer of the band. I work with a lot of bands, and I think he’s brilliant.

Any time he proposes something, he has a deep reason why, and that sells me on a lot of stuff. If someone can propose something to me and back it up with reasons, I’m in. With that title, he had reasons for sure. I was like, oh, this makes total sense, because obviously it relates to the political side of things. Then Dave’s father died during the recording process. Our other guitarist, Anthony’s mother, died during the recording process. It’s like there’s some morbid… how much time do you really have left? This is your mortality, right? Questioning your mortality combined with crazy shit going on politically right now, it feels more extreme than ever.

I’m glad to see a lot of bands speaking out about that stuff. You have bands like The Wonder Years speaking out about Palestine and Warped Tour. Seriously, 10 or 15 years ago, that was a no-go for bands like that. It was controversial when my old band and The World Is were part of digital compilations to promote same-sex marriage in 2010. Even 10 years ago, that stuff was very controversial for bands, and a lot of bands around us were like, oh, I’m afraid. I don’t want to say anything about that. Maybe now they might. I think all those people feel differently.

It’s like, yeah, you die when you die, obviously. What’s left? What do you leave behind? There’s a song title called “Those Who Outlive Us”. There are people who live past you. How do you make the world a better place? Obviously, we have this band name that could have a deep meaning. We’ve repeated that whole name in songs and stuff. I think there’s an ethos there. What are basic human rights? I wake up every day and it’s like, we’re getting rid of Medicare, we’re getting rid of this. Meanwhile, the government is putting $200 million into renovating a room in the White House with gold all over the ceiling or some other crazy shit they just announced. It’s like Marie Antoinette stuff.

These records for us are ways to express that feeling, whether it’s outwardly political, which some of the songs absolutely are, or dealing with loss within our lives. It’s about getting that out of our system and dealing with that death. Or you wake up one day and ask yourself, do I have health insurance? If I break my hand on tour, am I going to have to live with the pain for the rest of my life because I can’t get care? Our drummer Steve literally just broke his wrist a few days ago, so he’s navigating that right now. We’re going to have a fill-in drummer who’s a good friend of ours on this upcoming tour.

There’s stuff on the record that deals with those questions. Will I live to see the next day? Can we leave this record behind? Obviously, we’re all going to die eventually, but if we can leave this piece of art behind, that’s something we contributed to the world. I say that without trying to be corny, but having experienced friends who are musicians and have passed away, they leave behind some legacy of what they created. The ultimate thing is, can you create something you’re proud of for people to experience later on and contribute something, instead of being meaningless? Try to be the best you can be to other people. That’s the kind of stuff we’re thinking about whenever we’re making these songs and putting them together.

On the production side, since you also work with other bands, are there any projects you’re currently involved with that you’re excited about and that readers should keep an eye on?

Yeah, I'll name one right now. They just had a single come out. It's a band called How Much Art. It's Pat Flynn and Sean Costa from Fiddlehead and Halfheart. A couple of the other members played in a band called Down Talker. They just had a single come out a week or so ago. I continually believe that Pat is one of the most brilliant people I've worked with, aside from Dave. They have their own strengths, but I've been lucky enough to do multiple records with his other band, Fiddlehead, which honestly helped change my life. I don’t say that lightly because it brought me into a whole other sphere of bands to work with. Before, it used to be like, oh, bands that liked World Is would go to me [for production work].

There are a lot of other records I've worked on over the years, but the through line was a lot of World Is fans. Then I noticed a shift after I started working with Fiddlehead. It was like, oh, people like that record, or Anxious, I did one of their LPs.

Anyways, there's another band that I'm working with called Cinema Stare. We're finishing up a single now. They're from Connecticut. They're on a label called Static Era, run by my friends Jay Reason and Chris Szczerba. I'll name one other band called Shoreline. I was just working on edits for them. They're on Pure Noise Records. They're from Germany. I'm working on an LP for them right now. We had a couple of singles come out this past year. I love those guys. This is the second LP that I'm doing with them now.

Is there a dream band you’ve always wanted to work with or produce for, whether it’s a current band, a past band, or even one that’s no longer around?

That's a really good question because… it's a hard one. It is funny because there are bands that I love where I’ll say, when they come out with a record, say it’s a legacy band or something, occasionally I’ll be talking to my studio partner or friends, and I’ll be like, oh man, I would love to produce that or something.

But now when the question gets posed, I’m like, oh damn, what would it be? Let’s see. For example, I’ll throw an easy one: Sunny Day Real Estate. If that band did a comeback record, oh my God, I would love to do it. I’m not saying that out of thinking I would be the best option in the world. I’m just saying I would love to do it. That would be amazing.

Also, The Blood Brothers. If they ever did a comeback record, it would literally… that actually might be my number one.

Dreams of Being Dust comes out August 22nd via Epitaph Records.