TOP FIVE EVERY TIME I DIE ALBUMS

I first got into Every Time I Die some time before the release of The Big Dirty, probably the winter of 2007 if I remember right. They quickly became one of my favorite bands, and though as an outfit they are no longer with us, they remain one of my favorites to this day. I have so many great memories connected to their music, whether it’s road trips with an ETID soundtrack or getting tattooed in Bulgaria while Ex Lives is blasting (shout out to Sofia Hardcore Tattoos!).

It’s rather uncommon for a band or artist to have the longevity to release five albums, let alone nine to choose from—and in a real rarity for them to never miss over a multi-decade career! It’s really a shame they broke up, beyond the break-up’s contentious nature, as it’s not like they were trending downward on their final release, 2021’s Radical. Spoiled for choice, we’ll be looking at the top five of Buffalo Music Hall of Fame Class of 2019 members Every Time I Die.

"With the noble irreverence of shrapnel she came for us."

5. Radical (2021)

As I said above, they were not trending downward when they broke up. Although this album doesn’t reinvent their wheel, the band is firing on all cylinders here. Keith Buckley’s razor-sharp wit is as always on display with the lyrics—it’s rare an artist can actually make you laugh at loud with some of their lines. Lyrically the record is also at once topical and personal. Album highlights include: "Post-Boredom" and "White Void," which showcase the band’s ability to write catchy and memorable rock songs, with more of a stoner metal influence in the latter case, while still retaining their signature heaviness; "Planet Shit," which like several other songs on the album such as "Dark Distance" seems to be written from the lens of COVID, whereas in actuality they anticipated it; and "Distress Rehearsal," a relentless track featuring a nasty breakdown halfway through the song hearkening back to their early days. Lyrically it makes a surprising turn from "Envision obliteration / Every last detail / Blast wind blows, breathe it in, let it go / A tragedy that's so big, it cannot fail" to:

But now there's beauty all around me
What's happening? (What's happening?)
What's happening? (What's happening?)

Now I'm left with all this lightness
Now I'm left with all this lightness
Left out here with all this lightness
Left out here with all this grace

Imagine my surprise

I thought my heart would break
I thought it would break but it started healing
It was more than I could take
So I gave it everything

4. Gutter Phenomenon (2005) and The Big Dirty (2007)

Okay, I cheated, but I think you have to take these two albums together as they are the heads-and-tails of Every Time I Die’s Southern metalcore output. Alongside its "rock-core" mini-trend analog in Britain (Outcry Collective, The Ghost of a Thousand, The Plight, etc.), the Southern metalcore trend was booming in the mid-2000s, with (shout out to Ferret Records for a lot of these releases) Every Time I Die along with He Is Legend, Maylene and the Sons of Disaster, The Hottness, Fight Paris, Norma Jean to an extent, His Name Was Iron, The Showdown, The Great American Beast, I think you could put A Life Once Lost’s Iron Gag in this category, so on and so forth. One of my favorite styles of metalcore—we need a revival!—and one of my favorite eras of ETID. In a word: riffs. In another: riffs!

As a lyricist, Keith Buckley is one of the best to ever do it, and that was always a strength of his, as was his charisma and stage presence as a frontman; indeed, the personalities of band mainstays Keith Buckley and guitarists Andy Williams and Jordan Buckley were a large part of the magnetic appeal of the band. Gutter Phenomenon is the album where Keith Buckley really leveled-up as a vocalist; according to screaming coach Melissa Cross of "The Zen of Screaming" speaking to the Los Angeles Times in 2005, when asked who had mastered this new technique—keep in mind the quantum leap vocalists have made in the last maybe fifteen years and the fact that this was way before the animal noise Vocal Olympics of modern deathcore—"Corey Taylor from Slipknot is a master. Keith Buckley from Every Time I Die." Buckley’s raw and harried vocals suited the frenzied chaos of ETID’s first two albums, but you can clearly hear the jump on Gutter. His singing voice had also improved.

As for the songs themselves, many of the ingredients from Last Night in Town and Hot Damn! were still present, but as Keith Buckley stated at the time, "Too many bands find their niche, and put the same ingredients into every soup. Not us. We knew we had changed, grown up, and acquired new tastes and distastes for music, and became a little more accepting of the background we all had—which was growing up, listening to classic rock from our parents. But on this record, we embraced that. We tried to hide it before because we didn't think it had any room in the 'hardcore community.'" Exemplifying their leaning in to this rock sound would be tracks like "Kill the Music" and "We’rewolf."

3. Low Teens (2016)

Their heaviest record emotionally, "Buckley came terrifyingly close to a devastating loss last year [2015] when his wife—seven months pregnant at the time—suffered a sudden and severe complication that threatened her life and that of the couple's unborn child." As Keith Buckley told Revolver in 2016:

I learned more in that one night than in the previous 36 years I was alive. The worst part was dealing with these insane and vivid images of the what-ifs: What if my wife dies and the baby survives? Who helps me raise the baby? What if the baby dies? How does that affect our relationship? I had to envision these things because they were real possibilities. It was difficult, but it was fortifying as far as your soul goes, and it all went into the record.

You can certainly hear that in the desperation, darkness, and urgency of the album. "Petal," in particular, is about as heavy as it gets for the band, musically and emotionally. The album runs the gamut of styles ETID has incorporated, from more accessible songs like rocker "Two Summers" and the "burn slow, there’s no rush" of "It Remembers" featuring Brandon Urie of Panic! at the Disco to the aforementioned crushing "Petal." Every drummer ETID’s had has been awesome, but Daniel Davison brought a different dimension than they’d had before, and I think added some really interesting playing on this record. While there might not be anything particularly new for the band on this one, everything here is executed at an extremely high level; every song is fantastic, the album flows really well, and the lyrics are as good as it gets Jack Nicholson.

Around the release of this record would be the last two times I saw them live—I can’t remember in which order it was but I know I saw them at Warped Tour that year (I don’t believe the album was out yet but they definitely played "Petal"), and my dad and I also saw them headline a stacked lineup in Portland, Maine with support from Eternal Sleep, Harms Way, and Knocked Loose. They killed it, as always.

2. Hot Damn! (2003)

Though 2001’s Last Night in Town has some of their best songs ("Jimmy Tango’s Method" and my favorite ETID track "The Logic of Crocodiles"), it is their most uneven full-length. Hot Damn! is the peak of their nervous-breakdown-core/Deadguy era. The frenetic and harried nature of the music reinforces the hysterical (in multiple senses) quality of the lyrics and vocals. Classics like "Floater" and "Ebolarama" (with the latter’s preposterous music video) pretty much speak for themselves, but beyond those, the whole album rips from front-to-back. "I Been Gone a Long Time" is another great song that foreshadowed the band’s leaning in to their more rock sensibilities.

1. New Junk Aesthetic (2009)

Part of the embarrassment of riches that was the years 2008 and 2009 in heavy music—in my humble opinion the best two-year stretch of all time, and I’m sure I’ll write about this at some point—New Junk Aesthetic re-combined elements from what we can now call the first half of their career in the Deadguy and Southern metalcore eras, respectively, while introducing some new ones as well. It took me a little while to warm up to this one when it first dropped as it wasn’t necessarily what I wanted, but it turned out to be exactly what I needed, if you will. The different influences at work here plus the maturity of the band resulted in a really unique sound I’ve always described as "the blues for hardcore kids." The guitar work in the band was always excellent, but on this record Jordan Buckley and Andy Williams really hit another level, and this is also the album Keith Buckley took another huge leap as a vocalist. This album is a 10/10 classic, perfect in every way.