The Blue Nowhere may be the strangest place Between the Buried and Me have taken us yet—and that’s saying something for a band whose entire career is a long corridor of trap doors, secret passages, and stylistic whiplash. This isn’t Colors, and it certainly isn’t The Parallax. This is BTBAM stepping through Door #3, a portal where their past and future collide in a kaleidoscope of funky jazz detours, dad-prog gleam, and metal that feels softer around the edges.
Things We Tell Ourselves in the Dark sets that tone immediately—bubbling with 80s synths, buoyant basslines, and an almost playful groove. It’s a strange, airy opener that feels too light and too polished to ring familiar, like a prog-metal fever dream soaked in neon. The band’s technical prowess hasn’t dimmed, but the claws feel filed down; the aggression tempered. It’s metal for the middle-aged visionaries who once moshed to Selkies and now spend weekends tweaking pedalboards. Still, the production is immaculate: drums crack like thunder in a glass room, the bass punches with newfound thickness, and the mix sparkles with detail. You’re left wondering: Is this evolution, or a beautifully indulgent midlife crisis?
Then God Terror arrives, and that doubt starts to dissolve. The industrial synths grind, the guitars chug with purpose, and the rhythmic assault pulls you back into familiar BTBAM gravity. The interplay between soft and harsh vocals feels like a handshake with their own legacy—acknowledging where they’ve been without fully retreating. Absent Thereafter pushes further outward, blending twangy country guitar, harmonica flourishes, and saxophone bursts into a prog-metal vortex that shouldn’t work but somehow does. It’s Van Halen meets cosmic bluegrass, a ridiculous premise elevated by sheer conviction—exactly the kind of chaos-with-purpose that has defined the band’s most daring moments.
But not every experiment lands cleanly. Pause functions as an eerie, slow-burn interlude—atmospheric but skeletal. Mirador Uncoil, on the other hand, is a full plunge into the bizarre, complete with flutes, xylophones, and unsettling baby murmurs. These pieces add flavor, texture, and character, yet they also fracture the album’s flow. It’s classic BTBAM: brilliant one second, baffling the next, perpetually dancing on the border between avant-garde and absurdity.
Metal returns to the forefront with Door #3 and Psychomanteum, where the riffs slice clean, the bass thrums with authority, and the drums once again prove to be the album’s secret weapon—nimble, thunderous, and constantly shifting tectonic plates beneath the band’s feet. Still, even at their most muscular, BTBAM can’t resist slipping into circus-like interludes or jazzy noodling that both enriches and complicates the experience. Slow Paranoia embodies this tug-of-war perfectly: eerie and groovy one moment, goofy and rhythmically disorienting the next. It’s the sound of a band constitutionally incapable of staying still, even when momentum begs for it.
Then the title track, The Blue Nowhere, steps in like a breath taken after too many held notes. It floats between ambience and subdued prog, haunting yet restrained. At first it seems almost too minimal, bordering on bland, but with time it unfurls into something cinematic. It doesn’t aim to dazzle—it aims to soothe, to reset, to prepare.
Beautifully Human brings the album home with unexpected earnestness. Acoustic guitars shimmer with melancholy, expanding into a wide, cosmic soundscape that feels like BTBAM finally exhaling after nine tracks of madness. It’s heartfelt, spacey, cathartic—an emotional landing strip for an album that spends most of its runtime joyously destabilizing the listener.
In the end, The Blue Nowhere stands as one of BTBAM’s strangest contradictions: an album both meticulously overthought and profoundly human. It’s prog metal for adults—still dazzlingly technical, but no longer burdened by the need to prove it. Sometimes it’s too soft, sometimes it’s too strange, but when the pieces align, the result is a fragile, luminous beauty few bands could even attempt.
If Colors was the sound of a band discovering infinity, The Blue Nowhere is them standing at its edge—unsure whether to laugh, cry, or fire off one last jazz-fusion riff before disappearing into the void.
NOTABLE TRACKS:
Absent Thereafter
Door #3
The Blue Nowhere