The Dear Hunter announce tour with TWIABP and Tanner of O'Brother
Progressive alt-rockers The Dear Hunter have a new album called Antimai on the way, and they’ll support it on a 2022 tour with two very cool openers: The World Is a Beautiful Place & I Am No Longer Afraid to Die and O’Brother vocalist Tanner Merritt (who has collaborated with The Dear Hunter in the past). The Dear Hunter will be playing their new album in full, plus “additional songs voted on by the TDH community.”
The tour kicks off with shows in San Francisco (3/3 at The Chapel) and LA (3/4 at Lodge Room), and it eventually makes its way East, where it will hit Brooklyn’s Music Hall of Williamsburg on March 20. Tickets for that show go on sale Friday (11/19) at 10 AM. All dates are listed on the tour poster below.
The World Is a Beautiful Place & I Am No Longer Afraid to Die just wrapped up their own headlining tour at Brooklyn’s Elsewhere this past weekend (pics, review), and their excellent new album Illusory Walls is out now on Epitaph Records. For more on the album, read our interview with guitarist Chris Teti.
Tanner Merritt released his solo album CYRUS I: WEIGHT OF REFLECTION earlier this year (stream it below), and O’Brother are gearing up to celebrate the 10th anniversary of their 2011 debut album Garden Window with a livestream on December 10 (tickets).
The Dear Hunter also recently released The Indigo Child, the soundtrack to a new short film, and you can stream that below too.
 
 
 
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15 Albums That Shaped Progressive Post-Hardcore in the 2000s
The Mars Volta – De-Loused in the Comatorium (2003)
Coheed & Cambria – In Keeping Secrets of Silent Earth: 3 (2003)
These Arms Are Snakes – Oxeneers or the Lion Sleeps When Its Antelope Go Home (2004)
The Sound of Animals Fighting – Tiger and the Duke (2005)
The Receiving End of Sirens – Between the Heart and the Synapse (2005)
Gospel – The Moon Is A Cold Dead World (2005)
The Number Twelve Looks Like You – Nuclear. Sad. Nuclear (2005)
The Fall of Troy – Doppelgänger (2005)
Protest The Hero – Kezia (2005)
Fear Before The March of Flames – The Always Open Mouth (2006)
Damiera – M(US)IC (2007)
Circa Survive – On Letting Go (2007)
Dance Gavin Dance – Dance Gavin Dance (2008)
2000s progressive post-hardcore was kind of the result of a bunch of different post-hardcore bands trying their hands at progressive rock all at once. A lot of these bands ended up collaborating and touring together, but it took a few years for this to seem like a coherent subgenre. When the next wave of progressive post-hardcore bands cropped up at the turn of the 2010s, they very much had a specific shared sound in mind. That sound got dubbed "swancore," and the person who coined it was Dance Gavin Dance guitarist (and Blue Swan Records founder) Will Swan. Dance Gavin Dance served as the direct bridge between the early 2000s bands and the 2010s bands (many of whom were signed to Blue Swan). They took the influence of a lot of the earlier bands on this list and they bottled it up and stirred it around until it sounded like an accessible blend of just about all of them. Their self-titled sophomore LP is their second album and first with clean vocalist Kurt Travis (who would go on to front A Lot Like Birds and also has a band with The Fall of Troy frontman Thomas Erak, among many other projects), following their 2007 debut with now-controversial vocalist Jonny Craig. Kurt's a real wailer who can sometimes sound like a cross between Anthony Green and Casey Crescenzo, and Will Swan's mind-melting riffage exists somewhere in the middle ground between The Fall of Troy and The Mars Volta. Sometimes prog bands get a little too polished, and DGD definitely flirt with the cleaner side of the genre, but they keep things gnarly thanks to screamer Jon Mess, who clearly learned his screaming chops from '90s screamo and splits vocal duties almost 50/50 with Kurt on this LP. (They also had some guest vocalists on this album, including none other than Deftones frontman Chino Moreno.) When this album first came out, it might've seemed like a product of its influences, but at this point, DGD have become a highly influential (and long-lasting and consistent) band themselves, and this decade-plus-old sophomore LP still holds up.
Exclusive, limited Dance Gavin Dance vinyl variants available in our shop.