If 2017’s Always Foreign smartly retrofitted TWIABP’s sprawling indie rock with clear-eyed vocals and concise song structures, Illusory Walls redraws the blueprints again. It is the most technically proficient and hard-hitting music in their discography, albeit at the cost of their unique intimacy and warmth. Written and recorded remotely during the pandemic, it is the band’s first album to prominently employ an outside co-producer (Greg Thomas), and the first to feature just one main guitarist (down from three). Their fourth album, Illusory Walls, sounds like a grim reincarnation of the band they once were. The band-whose five members are split between Philadelphia and rural Connecticut-is best known for bringing a hyper-specific authenticity and uplifting collectivism to the wistful guitar plucks and squeaky singing of the early 2010s emo revival. For The World Is a Beautiful Place & I Am No Longer Afraid to Die, the next step is salvaging the wreckage and reconstructing it as a brutalist sculpture. The past few years have been enough to turn the widest-eyed dreamer into a staunchly cynical realist.
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