Riffology Score: 80/100
By rights this band should not exist. Three of Better Lovers' five members spent twenty-four years in Every Time I Die before a cease-and-desist over the name, a public sibling feud and a Buffalo lockout that ended a marriage of brothers Jordan and Keith Buckley. Then Greg Puciato, eight years removed from The Dillinger Escape Plan's farewell run and deep into a solo career nobody could have predicted, walked into Will Putney's New Jersey studio and gave the orphaned rhythm section a new mouth.
Highly Irresponsible is the proof that the resulting outfit is not a one-EP novelty. It is a ten-track debut LP, recorded over two months at the producer's own desk, that sounds like five people who have nothing left to prove and one enormous chip on the collective shoulder. The fact that Puciato had already announced his amicable departure by the time you read this only sharpens its peculiar status as both arrival and farewell.
Album Facts
| Field | Detail |
|---|---|
| Artist | Better Lovers |
| Album | Highly Irresponsible |
| Release Date | 25 October 2024 |
| Label | SharpTone Records |
| Producer | Will Putney |
| Studio | Graphic Nature Audio, Belleville, New Jersey |
| Recorded | January to February 2024 |
| Genre / Subgenre | Metalcore, hardcore punk, mathcore |
| Track Count | 10 (standard); 12 (deluxe, November 2025) |
| Total Runtime | 34:57 (standard); 40:57 (deluxe) |
| US Chart Peak | Did not enter the Billboard 200; debut LP for SharpTone |
| UK Chart Peak | Strong specialist press coverage; no mainstream UK Albums Chart entry reported |
| Notable Reviews | Kerrang! 4/5, Blabbermouth 8/10, Distorted Sound 8/10, Louder Sound 3/5 |
| Key Singles | A White Horse Covered In Blood, Future Myopia, At All Times, Love As An Act Of Rebellion |
Cultural Context: A Heavy 2024
Better Lovers landed their debut into the busiest fortnight heavy music had seen in years. October 2024 was the month Knocked Loose's You Won't Go Before You're Supposed To was still soaking up its post-Coachella afterglow, Sleep Token had crossed into arenas with Even In Arcadia looming on the horizon, and the wider hardcore wave that critics had been politely calling a "revival" since 2022 had become an outright land grab. The week of release alone saw new records from Tyler, The Creator and The Cure pulling cultural oxygen, while underneath, SharpTone was lining up the kind of left-field heavy debut a major label would not have touched five years earlier.
That context matters because Highly Irresponsible was never going to chart against Charli XCX. It was always going to be measured against:
- Knocked Loose's mainstream crossover and the new ceiling it set for guitar-heavy aggression
- The lingering shadow of two of the most quietly influential American heavy records of the 2000s, Every Time I Die's Gutter Phenomenon and Dillinger Escape Plan's Miss Machine
- Will Putney's own brutal day job, Fit For An Autopsy, whose Oh What The Future Holds in 2022 had already reset what mid-tier metal could sound like with his desk behind it
- An audience grieving Every Time I Die and willing to weaponise nostalgia against any band tactless enough to feed it
How Better Lovers Actually Happened
The short version is well known. The long version is uglier, and worth understanding because almost every choice on Highly Irresponsible traces back to it.
In December 2021, Every Time I Die frontman Keith Buckley announced a hiatus citing mental health, then within forty-eight hours alleged on social media that his brother Jordan and his bandmates had been quietly plotting to replace him. The band issued a statement saying they were working through it privately, played one last show on 11 December, and on 18 January 2022 the four instrumentalists, including Jordan Buckley, Andy Williams, Stephen Micciche and Clayton Holyoak, declared the band over after twenty-four years. The next day, Keith revealed he had been served with a cease-and-desist on 20 December ordering him to stop using the Every Time I Die name and likeness.
That is the wreckage Buckley, Micciche and Holyoak walked out of. They kept practising. By November 2022 they were quietly at Will Putney's New Jersey studio with new material; Putney had produced the last two Every Time I Die albums, Low Teens and Radical, and the relationship was easy. Andy Williams, by then committed to professional wrestling with All Elite Wrestling as The Butcher, was not in those sessions and would not join the band that emerged.
Greg Puciato, the wildcard, had spent the back end of the 2010s building one of heavy music's stranger CVs: The Dillinger Escape Plan's final album and tour, the supergroup Killer Be Killed, the electronic duo The Black Queen, and two solo records that mostly refused to scream. The match was made privately first, in demos and phone calls, before Better Lovers were announced to the world on 17 April 2023 with the single "30 Under 13". A surprise EP, God Made Me An Animal, dropped without warning on 7 July 2023.
"We don't look at it that way. While it's impossible to not acknowledge the past bands that we were in that we're proud of, this thing is its own thing/beast/entity. We're not here for a cup of coffee. We still have something to say creatively, and that's a thing that doesn't just go away and is very important to all of us."
Stephen Micciche, Better Lovers Instagram statement, April 2023
Pre-production and Demos
By the autumn of 2023, Better Lovers were already telling Revolver they had "a whole album's worth of new songs in the works", and on 16 November they put out the standalone single "Two Alive Amongst The Dead" partly as a holding pattern. The album itself was confirmed on 9 January 2024 in a band Instagram post that became the de facto pre-production statement:
"In 2023 we surprised you with music a handful of times, but to do that with the sixteen new songs we've written would be unsafe. Preparation is necessary. Patience is appreciated. Ears are ringing. The parts are psychotic. The mood is immaculate. Chef Putney is cooking."
Better Lovers, band statement on Instagram, January 2024
A few details from that period are worth pinning down before they vanish into Wikipedia paragraphs:
- Sixteen songs were written for the album; subsequent social media posts pegged seventeen tracked at Graphic Nature, ten of which made the standard LP
- "The Flowering", released as a stand-alone single on 2 April 2024, had circulated live throughout 2023 under the working title Punk
- The band road-tested material on the SeeYouSpaceCowboy / Foreign Hands / Greyhaven North American tour in spring 2024, which slotted in between the writing sessions and the album campaign
- Despite the deep relationship with Putney from the Every Time I Die years, Andy Williams' absence meant Buckley had to rethink a twin-guitar identity built around a different sparring partner
Creating the Album at Graphic Nature Audio
Recording ran across January and February 2024 at Graphic Nature Audio, the Belleville, New Jersey studio Putney built out of his Fit For An Autopsy income. There is no separate producer credit, no hired engineer flown in to ride herd, no second mixer brought in to "translate" the record for radio. Putney produced, engineered, mixed and mastered the album he was simultaneously playing guitar on, with Steve Seid assisting on engineering and Tommy Vasta on production. The sleeve was designed by Don Phury, depicting a boy's head exploding into a fountain of fireworks against a sickly green sky.
The decision to keep the chain that short is the central production fact of Highly Irresponsible. Putney is one of the most in-demand desks in modern heavy music, with credits across Knocked Loose, Body Count, Thy Art Is Murder and Northlane; he had spent the previous decade making mid-tier metalcore sound roughly twice its size. Here, he was making a record for himself, in his own studio, with three former clients and one new singer. The signal path is recognisably his (tight, dry, vicious low-end; guitars stacked but not glossed; vocals close-mic'd and bone-dry), but the arrangement choices are looser than a Putney-for-hire job. Songs end abruptly. Edits jolt. Puciato's vocal is allowed to crack.
The other production tell: where Every Time I Die albums almost always tracked drums first as a band, Better Lovers had already spent eighteen months living with these songs as a touring unit before the studio. Holyoak's drums sit slightly behind the beat in places they would have been gridded on Radical. There is air in the kit that Putney's day-job clients do not get.
"We put a lot of energy into this one and love every second of it. A record so purely and selfishly for us, it gave birth to some real magic translating through the speakers. Old habits and new tricks. Insanity and restraint, beauty and chaos. Art as it is intended."
Better Lovers, statement to mailing-list subscribers reproduced in Revolver, July 2024
Personnel and Credits
| Role | Player | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Better Lovers | ||
| Vocals, lyrics | Greg Puciato | Formerly The Dillinger Escape Plan, Killer Be Killed, The Black Queen. Departed the band amicably in February 2026, making this his final full-length with the project. |
| Guitar | Jordan Buckley | Co-founding guitarist of Every Time I Die. The riffs and song architecture are largely his. |
| Guitar, production | Will Putney | Also current guitarist in Fit For An Autopsy. Produced Every Time I Die's final two records before becoming a Better Lover. |
| Bass | Stephen Micciche | Ex-Every Time I Die. The band's public spokesperson during the launch. |
| Drums | Clayton "Goose" Holyoak | Ex-Every Time I Die. |
| Production and engineering | ||
| Production, engineering, mixing, mastering | Will Putney | Recorded entirely at his own Graphic Nature Audio in Belleville, NJ. |
| Engineering | Steve Seid | Long-time Graphic Nature collaborator. |
| Production assistant | Tommy Vasta | |
| Artwork | ||
| Artwork | Don Phury | The exploding-head sleeve and the alternate deluxe-edition cover both bear his signature. |
| Notable by absence | ||
| Guitar | Andy Williams | The Every Time I Die guitarist did not join the Better Lovers project; he had committed to professional wrestling with All Elite Wrestling as "The Butcher" by the time the sessions began. Putney took the second-guitar slot. |
The Songs
| # | Title | Writer(s) | Length | Single? | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Lie Between The Lines | Better Lovers | 4:29 | Mid-paced opener that doubles as the album's mission statement. | |
| 2 | Your Misplaced Self | Better Lovers | 1:32 | Ninety-second hardcore detonation, the shortest cut on the LP. | |
| 3 | A White Horse Covered In Blood | Better Lovers | 3:18 | Lead single, 30 July 2024 | The most overtly Dillinger / ETID-shaped track on the record. |
| 4 | Future Myopia | Better Lovers | 3:38 | Single, 28 August 2024 | Built around Buckley's "chunky" central riff and the album's closest approximation of a breakdown. |
| 5 | Deliver Us From Life | Better Lovers | 4:28 | Grunge tropes and "wonky Sabbath-isms" per Blabbermouth's Dom Lawson. | |
| 6 | Drowning In A Burning World | Better Lovers | 2:44 | The album's most outright punk-rock moment. | |
| 7 | Everything Was Put Here For Me | Better Lovers | 3:26 | Misanthropic noise rock; lyrics dismantle the species' opinion of itself. | |
| 8 | Superman Died Paralyzed | Better Lovers | 3:27 | Warped thrash with a nihilist streak. | |
| 9 | At All Times | Better Lovers | 4:36 | Single, 25 September 2024 | The album's quiet outlier, closer to Puciato's solo work. |
| 10 | Love As An Act Of Rebellion | Better Lovers | 3:19 | Single, 22 October 2024 | Closer; the deluxe edition's video release. |
| 11 | The Impossible End | Better Lovers | 3:09 | Deluxe only | Added to the 13 November 2025 deluxe reissue. |
| 12 | Don't Forget To Say Please | Better Lovers | 2:51 | Deluxe only | Released as a 2025 single ahead of the deluxe edition. |
Side one: the manifesto and the fistfights
Lie Between The Lines opens the record the way the best opening tracks open the best records: by telling you exactly what kind of band this is and trusting you to keep up. There is a tense, stuttering groove, a giant riff, and Puciato barking the closest thing to a personal credo he has written since Dillinger's Option Paralysis: "I can't believe I'm just like you." It is mid-paced by Better Lovers standards, which means it is still faster than half of metalcore's current chart.
Your Misplaced Self arrives ninety seconds later and ends almost as fast. Blabbermouth's Dom Lawson nailed the reference point: it sounds, he wrote, "like somebody plugged The Jesus Lizard into the power grid and fed them magic mushrooms." It is the album's purest hardcore-punk moment and the clearest proof that this band's restraint is a choice, not a limit.
A White Horse Covered In Blood, the song they sent out first on 30 July 2024, is the one the algorithm has loved most. It is also the most obviously back-catalogue-baiting track on the record, with the kind of angular, dissonant riff that would have sat at home on Miss Machine. The vein-popping Puciato performance is the headline, but Buckley's right hand is the actual story; the song's pulse comes from a guitar pattern that refuses to land on the downbeat anyone is expecting.
Future Myopia is the breakdown song. Better Lovers do not really do breakdowns, so what counts as one here is a half-time chug that lasts maybe sixteen bars before the band gets bored and changes shape. The video, directed in low-light digital, is the closest the campaign came to a traditional metalcore performance clip.
Deliver Us From Life closes the first half by widening the colour palette. The chords lean grungier, the tempo drops, and the band lets a hook breathe for the first time. Dom Lawson called it a song that "projects to the back row" without ever feeling like a sop to radio.
Side two: the second half is the meaner one
If the first half of Highly Irresponsible is the album showing you what it can do, the second half is the album showing you what it would rather do.
Drowning In A Burning World is the punkest cut Better Lovers have written: a sub-three-minute hardcore blower with Puciato howling "Open me up! Hope is what you won't find!" over a band working in outright punk-rock mode. Everything Was Put Here For Me follows with a torrent of malicious noise-rock and the album's most quotable misanthropy ("We're dying… nobody cares"). Superman Died Paralyzed is the warped, brutish thrash song, all sharp turns and nihilist bile, that proves the bandmates' instincts for a really ugly mid-tempo riff have not dulled.
Then comes the album's curveball. At All Times is the slow song, the relatively-clean-sung song, the song the kerb-drop tour dads were going to either fall in love with or take to forums. It is not quite a ballad; Lawson described it as "a demonstration of songwriting prowess in the face of their own unhinged tendencies", which is a more generous read than Matt Mills's at Louder Sound, who heard "an earnest, Black Stone Cherry-esque rasp" that did not exactly inspire a demand for more. It is the Rorschach test of the record. Where you land on At All Times tells you what kind of Better Lovers fan you are.
Love As An Act Of Rebellion closes the album the way Every Time I Die's best records used to close: a blizzard of ideas crammed into three and a quarter minutes, riffs poking out of the structure like bones through skin, Puciato delivering the back end like a demented preacher seeing the wall coming. It is the song the band released last as a single (22 October 2024) and the song they made the album's most polished music video for; the clip is preserved in the body of this post as the canonical Better Lovers visual document.
Singles and Music Videos
Better Lovers ran a tight, four-single campaign in the run-up to the album, each one paired with a music video. None of them tried to be an event in the Tyler-or-Taylor sense; all of them were aimed squarely at the heavy-music ecosystem the band already commanded.
| Single | Release Date | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| A White Horse Covered In Blood | 30 July 2024 | Released the day after the album announcement, with an immediate music video. |
| Future Myopia | 28 August 2024 | Second single, paired with a performance-led clip. |
| At All Times | 25 September 2024 | The album's quietest moment, deliberately deployed as the third single to flag the band's range. |
| Love As An Act Of Rebellion | 22 October 2024 | Released three days before the album, with the most cinematic of the four videos. |
One earlier loose end is worth noting: The Flowering, released on 2 April 2024 with a Kerrang!-premiered video, was originally pitched as a standalone but is widely considered part of the same writing cycle. It did not make the standard tracklist for Highly Irresponsible, leaving it as the album-era song that exists outside the album, alongside the late-2023 single Two Alive Amongst The Dead.
Touring and Live
The campaign behind Highly Irresponsible was a venue-grade tour cycle rather than an arena one. The Fall 2024 North American run leaned hard into the band's underground credibility: Full of Hell, Gouge Away, Cloakroom and Spy supported, which is a billing few mainstream metalcore bands would dare assemble.
- Fall 2024 North American tour with Full of Hell, Gouge Away, Cloakroom and Spy, kicking off in Asheville, North Carolina on 3 November 2024 and finishing in Lakewood, Ohio on 8 December
- Blissmas '24, the band's second annual hometown festival in Buffalo in December 2024, expanded into a multi-day affair with a beer release, a live podcast and on-bill professional wrestling
- UK tour, January 2025, with Frontierer and Greyhaven, the kind of support package designed to pull the existing UK heavy scene into the room
- Festival appearances across 2024 and 2025 included Sick New World, Graspop Metal Meeting, Tons of Rock, Jera On Air and 2000Trees
The live picture sharpened the album's reputation. Sets opened reliably with Lie Between The Lines, the EP cut 30 Under 13 remained the encore detonator, and Puciato's stagecraft, honed during Dillinger Escape Plan's notorious late-period run, gave the new band a frontman who could pull a room together in eight seconds flat.
Critical Reception
The critical consensus on Highly Irresponsible sat in the same narrow band where most "supergroup debuts that are actually good" sit: somewhere between 7 and 8 out of 10, with the gap between high and low coming down to how much the reviewer needed the album to be a reinvention rather than a reaffirmation.
Kerrang!'s Sam Law (4/5) caught the tension cleanly:
"On one hand, the Buffalo supergroup's bringing together of [the band members] consolidates decades of learning from heavy music's cutting-edge and a fanbase ravenous to tear into some truly brilliant, unhinged sounds. On the other, it invites impossible comparisons to past records which will, frankly, never be topped."
Sam Law, Kerrang!, October 2024
Blabbermouth's Dom Lawson (8/10) was the most enthusiastic of the major outlets:
"Punishingly heavy at times, but smart and subtle too, Highly Irresponsible is a sophisticated and schizophrenic metal record: perfect for these confused and bewildering times. Hearing Puciato letting rip again, after his excellent but eclectic solo efforts to date, is particularly thrilling."
Dom Lawson, Blabbermouth.net, October 2024
Louder Sound's Matt Mills (3/5) was the closest thing to a hostile review, and even that was hostile in a deeply British, qualified-with-a-joke way:
"Highly Irresponsible is the sound of five cult stars clinging to the characteristics that made them cult stars, and it'd be hard to fault them for doing that. However, there's no sense of rejuvenation that makes this feel like the new, refreshing force people crave. It's a damn sight better than finding a dead dove in a bag, though."
Matt Mills, Louder Sound, October 2024
Distorted Sound's Lily Randall (8/10) was warmer still, calling the record "everything you'd hope for" and praising Putney's hand on the desk as the connective tissue. The pattern across reviews is consistent: nobody thought Highly Irresponsible moved metalcore forwards on its own, but nobody seriously argued it should have to.
Things You Might Not Know
| Fact | Detail |
|---|---|
| Sixteen songs in, ten songs out | The band wrote sixteen new songs before tracking and put as many as seventeen on tape at Graphic Nature; only ten made the standard LP, leaving a sizeable shelf of unused material the deluxe edition only partially raided. |
| The working title | "The Flowering", released as a single in April 2024, had been played live throughout 2023 under the working title Punk. |
| Putney is the only Better Lover with a day job | Will Putney remained a full member of Fit For An Autopsy throughout the album campaign, the only band member juggling another active project of comparable profile. |
| Andy Williams was never in the room | The fourth ex-Every Time I Die member, guitarist Andy Williams, was already wrestling full-time for All Elite Wrestling as The Butcher by the time these sessions began and was confirmed by Micciche as having no involvement in the initial recordings. |
| Self-produced from desk to master | Will Putney handled production, engineering, mixing and mastering himself, which is rare even among producer-musicians and a major reason the album sounds dryer than his Fit For An Autopsy or Knocked Loose work. |
| The cease-and-desist | Keith Buckley revealed in January 2022 that he had been served with a cease-and-desist on 20 December 2021, the week after Every Time I Die's final show, ordering him to stop using the band's name and likeness. |
| "Don't text and drive" | The band's album-announcement statement opened with the line "Don't text and drive, chew your food thoroughly, call the doctor for a check up… basically, do whatever it takes to make sure you're alive when our debut full length is released later this year." |
| The exploding-head sleeve has a sequel | Don Phury, who illustrated the standard cover, produced a separate piece of artwork for the November 2025 deluxe edition, making it one of the few recent metalcore records with two distinct sleeves in active circulation. |
| Blissmas became its own institution | The band's annual hometown festival in Buffalo expanded by its second edition in December 2024 to include a beer release, a live podcast taping and a professional wrestling card. |
| A debut LP that is also a farewell | Better Lovers announced an amicable split with Greg Puciato on 24 February 2026, while confirming work on a second studio album, meaning Highly Irresponsible stands as the only full-length Puciato will appear on with the band. |
Verdict
The cleanest way to judge Highly Irresponsible is to ask what it had to be. It had to be louder than the EP and more sustained than the singles. It had to give Buckley, Micciche and Holyoak a record that did not feel like an Every Time I Die outtakes session. It had to give Puciato a band that could carry his weight without flattening it. It had to be made by someone who would not break the spell, which is why Will Putney produced his own band. And it had to come out fast, before the cultural moment that birthed it slipped away.
It does all five things. It is not the album that reinvents anyone's wheel; nobody involved set out to. It is a record that takes the angles its makers spent twenty-five years learning and aims them with deliberate ugliness at a 2024 metalcore world that has, by and large, decided to be polite. The result is the kind of debut that ages better than its reviews. Eight out of ten now feels like one of those scores that quietly drifts upwards over the next decade.
The amicable Puciato departure announced in early 2026 changes the picture without invalidating it. Highly Irresponsible is now the document of a lineup that has already ceased to exist, made urgently by people who knew the moment was finite. That was always the album's defining angle. The departure just makes it impossible to miss.
Riffology Score: 80/100.
If this kind of deep-dive is your thing, the Riffology podcast goes album by album in the same spirit, picking the records apart in conversations between friends rather than reviewers. New episodes drop on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music and every other major platform; find the show under Riffology.
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