Post-hardcore heavywights, Dark Souls aficionados, and reigning champs of the sentence-long band name The World Is a Beautiful Place & I Am No Longer Afraid to Die burst back into the picture over the summer with a massive single whose title nearly matched the length of their band name, and which oddly mirrored the severely overlooked late-aughts period of their extremely-long-band-name forebears. Following by the post-punkier—yet somehow breezier—“Queen Sophie for President,” the third single from the band’s new LP Illusory Walls sways the pendulum back in the direction of the more atmospheric sound the record was introduced with, particularly mining similar shoegaze-y territory trod by Title Fight.
Lyrically, “Trouble” is a surreal trip through the ever-changing streets of the band’s native Philadelphia, as well as a broader look at the dissolving boundaries in our lives that separate our work life from our free time and other stark realities we can’t find the time in our busy schedules to meditate on. “What else is comedy but acceptance of the real / When you can’t afford the hospital and the ground is all banana peels?” intones David F. Bello at one point on the track. “‘Trouble’ is about Philadelphia, the good and the bad,” Bello shares. “If you go to a bar here and are at all like me and my friends, you will likely order or know someone who orders a ‘citywide’—a beer and a shot. One of those tastes refreshing, and the other is somewhat painful.”
Watch a Callum Scott-Dyson–directed video for the new single below, which sets the track to a bleak, post-industrial animation of city life (with imagery familiar to the record’s album art). Pre-order the record, which drops this Friday via Epitaph, here.
