Better Lovers should not exist. Not like this.
You take the guys from Every Time I Die after the band detonated, you hand them Greg Puciato, and you expect a mess. A victory lap wearing someone else’s shoes. A supergroup ego trip. Instead you get “God Made Me an Animal” and it sounds like a car crash that everyone walks away from grinning.
The riffing is Jordan Buckley chaos theory. Angular, ugly, swinging. Not mathy in the clinical sense. More like a bar fight where nobody’s trained but everybody’s committed. That ETID DNA is right there. The swagger. The refusal to play anything straight when a crooked version will hit harder.
And then Greg just opens his mouth and it works. His screams on this project hit different than Dillinger, different than The Black Queen. Less surgical, more street. He sounds like he’s having the time of his life being terrible. That grin you can hear. That’s the whole thing.
I put on “Two Among Many” when I need to feel like breaking something productive. Not sad breaking. Joyful destruction. The kind where you throw out everything on your desk and feel lighter after. There’s a lightness to this band that their individual pedigrees would not predict. They’re not brooding. They’re not crafting a statement. They’re throwing a party in a burning building and daring the roof to fall.
The production on Highly Irresponsible is thick and raw. Not polished metalcore gloss. Not lo-fi basement grit. Somewhere in between. It sounds like a band that recorded live and meant it. You can feel the room.
What keeps me coming back is that Better Lovers doesn’t apologize for being fun. Heavy music gets precious about its misery sometimes. Every band wants to be the soundtrack to your worst night. Better Lovers wants to be the soundtrack to your most unhinged good one. The one where you did something stupid and it was the right call.
A lot of supergroups feel like emails between celebrities. This one feels like five guys who genuinely missed being in a room making ugly sounds together. That energy is contagious. You can fake a lot of things in a studio. You can’t fake the sound of people enjoying each other’s chaos.
If you slept on Highly Irresponsible because the supergroup label made you roll your eyes, fair. I almost did too. But this is not a side project. This is a band that found its pulse immediately and doesn’t care if you approve.
Play it loud. Move furniture. Mean it.