“Your next band is going to be horrible.”
That was just one of the thousands of “evil” online messages that Jordan Buckley received in 2022 after the dissolution of his long-running band, Every Time I Die. But instead of getting crushed by the haters, these attacks actually set Buckley free.
Unburdened by expectations, the guitarist was able to live in the moment, rediscover pure creativity and experience the joy of making music simply for the love of it. This freedom ultimately led him to launch Better Lovers, the supergroup featuring former Dillinger Escape Plan frontman Greg Puciato, Buckley’s ETID bandmates Steve “Mitch” Micciche and Clayton “Goose” Holyoak, and Fit for an Autopsy guitarist Will Putney.
After introducing themselves with their 2023 EP, God Made Me an Animal, we find Buckley gearing up to release Better Lovers’ debut album Highly Irresponsible. He’s buzzing with positivity. He’s no longer dogged by doubt. Music is shiny, new and exciting again — skeptics be damned. “These monsters that were trying to kill my career, they only ended up helping,” he says, “because there was no pressure.”
Buckley isn’t the only one for whom Better Lovers has been a transformative experience. The band has also been an unexpected heavy-music rebirth for Puciato. Since Dillinger disbanded following 2016’s Dissociation, the singer has been focusing on an eclectic range of projects: from solo work (his most recent EP, FC5N, dropped earlier this year) to the synth-wave supergroup the Black Queen to the melting pot of metal greats that is Killer Be Killed (alongside members of Soulfly, Mastodon and Converge). He’s also been singing backup vocals for Jerry Cantrell.
“I’m super fucking proud of our record,” says Puciato. “I can’t believe how genuinely into it I am, because I didn’t think I had any of this left in me.”
The present is treating both Puciato and Buckley kindly, so it’s no wonder that both artists have no desire to relive their pasts. Where plenty of musicians are happy to roll back the years for a night or for a tour — and reap the financial benefits — nostalgia is a no-go for Better Lovers. Puciato, in particular, finds the concept acutely repellant. It’s been almost a decade since he closed the book on the Dillinger Escape Plan, after all, and time has put a remarkable distance between the Puciato of 2024 and the anxious, depressed, raging person he was back then.
“What they’re doing is they’re offering you money to put on a fucking suit of who you were 20 years ago and pretend that you’re that person — so that everyone in the crowd can also remember who they were 20 years ago,” he argues of anniversary tours. “I don’t fucking relate to it at all. My life right now is infinitely better than it was 20 years ago.”
For Buckley, the pain of his past is a little closer. The ugly, messy fracturing of Every Time I Die — which featured his brother, Keith Buckley, on vocals — is still a relatively fresh memory for the legions of fans left disappointed by their unexpected split. The striking thing is, however — thanks to the passing of time and the help of therapy — the guitarist is slowly becoming more forthcoming about his experiences, and how they’ve helped lead him towards a brighter future with Better Lovers.
“A year or two ago, I wouldn’t have talked about it because it hurt so much,” he explains. “But I’ve dealt with it, I made peace with it, I moved on.” Still, he’s keen to stress that he isn’t sharing these details to gain sympathy, but to deliver what he believes to be an “origin story” for Better Lovers.
“My past is what made me so grateful to be in Better Lovers and so grateful to be on tour again,” Buckley says. “Everything happens for you and not to you. If I didn’t have to go through this fucking car crash, I would not be in Better Lovers right now. Therefore, I have no choice but to be grateful that it happened, as fucked up as it made me.”
Jason Goodrich
Better Lovers, then, is a silver lining. Crucially, however, it’s not a hybrid of the Dillinger Escape Plan and Every Time I Die. Highly Irresponsible standouts “Your Misplaced Self” and “A White Horse Covered in Blood” bristle with scabrous hardcore grit, while “Future Myopia” screeches and thumps and the slowly unfurling “Deliver Us From Life” is a genius, jagged slice of balladry that breaks new ground for everyone involved in the project. Of course, fans of Dillinger and ETID have inevitably flocked to hear what their longtime favorites are doing, but both Puciato and Buckley have noticed that a sizeable section of their fanbase have found them without really knowing their erstwhile bands. Better Lovers is its own beast, and it’s roaring loudly.
“Being too young to have seen Dillinger is not a crazy thing, because Dillinger’s last record came out eight years ago. That’s more than middle school and high school put together, right?” reasons Puciato. “Every Time I Die broke up like two to three years ago, but in that time, what’s happened? Turnstile, Knocked Loose, all this shit, right? So, when we play, 50 percent of our crowd are people that were absolutely not around, not just for Dillinger, but also for Every Time I Die. That’s fucking really incredible. And I’m not lost on the fact that that is because whatever we’re doing together at this very moment is more than the sum of the parts from 20 years ago.”
We spoke to Buckley and Puciato about the joy of being Better Lovers, and the fury it took to create Highly Irresponsible.
Jason Goodrich
JORDAN BUCKLEY
“What have I been up to today?” Jordan Buckley echoes when Revolver asks how his day’s treated him so far. He’s perfectly happy to tell us everything. He had therapy earlier, and did his daily meditation ritual. In a brief moment of show-and-tell over Zoom, the guitarist demonstrates some of his meditative chants — before he points the camera to a device that he’s connected to a pair of headphones, which he explains is part of an experimental treatment for his tinnitus.
As the conversation progresses, he remains an open book. Buckley doesn’t believe anything, including the rather fraught aftermath of Every Time I Die’s split, should be off the table for discussion.
“I feel like if anybody’s going to do an interview, and they’re like, ‘Don’t ask me about this, don’t ask me about this’ — those are the things that [they] need to deal with,” he says. “Give someone a list of things to not talk about, and that would be the exact same list I would take to my therapist and go, ‘OK, we have to deal with all these things.’” Naturally, however, he’s more excited to lift the lid on the project that exists in the here and now: Better Lovers.
If life was fair — and if the internet wasn’t such a swamp of vitriol and ego — those clamoring for an ETID reunion would listen when Buckley says the best thing for all parties is the environment of peace and creativity Better Lovers affords him.
“I’m here to make myself happy from now on,” he asserts. “And guess what? When I’m happy, you’re going to be happy too.”
You and the rest of the band seem so excited about the music coming out. Does it still feel like better lovers are in the honeymoon phase?
Jordan Buckley I think it’s better than the hypothetical honeymoon phase, because now it feels smoother. Getting it off the ground had challenges, not to mention that the songs are incredibly difficult to play. But now, the wheels are greased. Everything is smoother. I almost feel like we’re in cruise control right now, because of how much hard work went into the beginning, and the writing and the recording. We’re more comfortable playing the songs, we’re more comfortable onstage — and so now we get to enjoy it.
Are these new songs the most complex you’ve written? Was there a particular reason they’re more difficult to execute live?
Will is just a superior guitar player to me. This is no disrespect, at all, to anyone I’ve played guitar with in the past, but Will is the best guitar player I know. When you surround yourself with [better players] you have no choice but to become better yourself — and you enjoy it. You embrace the learning and the growing. You want to be the best at what you do, you want to perfect your craft. If I can work alongside people who are constantly perfecting theirs, it’s only natural for it to trickle down to me. This band is open to allowing us all to show off in our own way.
What else makes Better Lovers so satisfying to be a part of?
We are so mentally on the same frequency, whether it’s jokes, ideas, plans or strategies. There’s such a complete lack of resistance when you can be yourself and absolutely trust and respect everyone on your team. We just all want each other to succeed. We want this band to succeed. We want everyone to succeed in their personal lives.
Maybe it’s the wisdom that comes with experience, or age — or just the fact that we’ve been doing this for so long. Maybe it’s a lot of trial and error, but that peace of mind is just the most important thing you could possibly have in life. It’s like, Holy shit, we got fucking magic here. Let’s not let this slip through our hands. Let’s do whatever we can to get as much juice out of the lemon as we can. We deserve this. We’re enjoying this because we know we’ve put the miles in — and now is our time to reap the benefits of what we’ve sown for the last couple of decades.
You’ve done music for many years now, but you’re back at the debut album stage. How does it feel to have that clean slate?
I do artwork on the side, and I get a lot of my job offers through the internet — so I kind of had no choice but to see everything that people were sending me when Every Time I Die broke up. It was just so evil and demonic and unacceptable. But I was able to twist it. If I’m being told that there’s only going to be 10 people at our next show, that means if there’s 11, then I win. A year before Better Lovers existed, I was being told Better Lovers sucks. I wish I could say it never had an effect on me, but it took some work to make sure that the effect was a positive one.
Following up Radical [Every Time I Die’s final record in 2021], which everyone loved so much, that would have been pressure. If the band actually was able to ride off in the sunset and not have such a cringy fucking meltdown of a break-up… and people were expecting big things out of me and Stephen and Goose’s next band — that would have been pressure. But I got the best of both worlds.
Gabe Becerra
Did you go into making Highly Irresponsible with any particular vision in mind?
We were just more excited to have an album that everyone was involved in from the ground up. That was when we kind of knew, OK, this is going to take on its own personality. We know people are going to look at the members, and our resumes are going to pop into people’s heads. But I think we’re doing a really good job, so far, of giving Better Lovers its own personality. I know, for a fact, this is different than anything I’ve ever done — and I know that everyone else in the band feels the same way about themselves. I’m such a fan of Greg and Will, and it was just such an honor to be able to write and record and work with them.
We lived at Will’s because he’s got a studio in his house — and we would record from the time we woke up to the time we went to bed. You’re exercising in the garage, but you’re listening to demos while you’re doing it. I’d sneak off and meditate once or twice a day. But as I’m meditating, I can’t help but be excited about the seed that’s growing into a plant. I wasn’t just learning the songs. I was learning new ways to write songs, compose songs, prep songs for vocals — and use the equipment, the hardware, the software. And to top it all off, you’re doing it with the people that you genuinely think are the funniest people in the world, who want nothing but peace and happiness for you. It was the best situation I could have asked for.
Despite the positivity surrounding Better Lovers, there’s still a sense of fury to the album — how did you tap into that rage?
I am a positive person, but I’m actively positive. I don’t just float through life. I have rituals and routines that I do to keep me this way. One thing I didn’t realize — I guess, because I never really had to — is when you’re playing angry music, it’s a healthy way to deal with your anger.
As I learned in therapy this morning, there is healthy anger [that] keeps you out of situations that you shouldn’t be in. I think a very healthy release of anger is playing angry music, which is why I was always so in love with my job. I really fucking enjoyed playing angry music because it kept me not angry, and I didn’t really realize this until it got taken away from me. I needed somewhere new to put it — because after Every Time I Die broke up, I was extremely angry. I mean, anger is one of the stages of grief, too. The band was murdered — sorry to put it so bluntly, but it was. I wrote some of the angriest stuff, and I just put it in [Better Lovers’] music. That’s where it comes from.
Jason Goodrich
GREG PUCIATO
The joke among those who know him is that Greg Puciato runs on his own time zone: GPT, as he refers to it. He’s not so much a night owl as he is borderline nocturnal — especially on tour like he is now — and as such, he’s quite happy to chat about music at 3 a.m. outside his hotel.
Puciato’s calendar is filled with Better Lovers gigs across the United States for the back end of 2024, but at this moment in time, he’s out with Jerry Cantrell doing backing vocals. He’s been at this gig for several years now, doing the sort of dream job that would send his teenage self running around screaming in excitement. “Jerry is one of my best friends on the planet,” he says. “In my whole life, there’s maybe five, maybe less, people who have been better friends with me than Jerry Cantrell.”
Pivoting from frontman to backing vocalist has been an informative experience for Puciato. “[I learned] I wasn’t as good of a singer as I thought I was,” he admits. “When you sing next to Jerry, you realize that he is a pitch-perfect singer. He hap-pens to play guitar, but he’s an incredible singer and he never hits a bad note. When you’re harmonizing with someone like that, the second something goes wrong, you’re aware that it’s you — it’s not him. He didn’t fuck up ‘Man in the Box.’ He didn’t fuck up ‘Rooster’ — you fucked it up.”
Once he’s wrapped the Cantrell tour, Puciato will be back in the front seat again with Better Lovers. And just like his bandmate, Jordan Buckley, he’s understandably quite excited to grab the reins.
Gabe Becerra
What is it that makes Better Lovers such a fulfilling project for you to be a part of?
Greg Puciato Jordan came to a Jerry Cantrell show we were playing in Vegas, and I was like, Oh, shit, I haven’t fucking seen Jordan in a really long time. He was like, “Hey, Every Time I Die broke up, me and Goose and Mitch have got some demos and we don’t really have any other singer in mind except for you.” I was like, “Jesus Christ, man, you know, that’s a lot of pressure.” I thought that my schedule was full. I was very content with doing solo shit and [performing with] Jerry, and I didn’t want to go backwards. I didn’t want to do Dillinger Escape Plan meets Every Time I Die — lowest common denominator — that’s not interesting to me.
Jordan sent me the songs, and when I heard them — after eight years or so of not making a Dillinger record — I realized that I was not the same person that I was when I made those last Dillinger records. I don’t have the same well to draw from, emotionally, stylistically. It’s not just Greg from Dillinger meets Every Time I Die, there’s this other possibility, right? I still thought that maybe it was just going to be a release — just an EP or an album — [when] I agreed to do it.
Then the interesting thing that happened was that, almost immediately, our audience seemed to be more than the sum of the parts. It didn’t seem like it was just Dillinger Escape Plan meets Every Time I Die. It seemed like something else was going on, whether it was the name or the aesthetic or the merch or this fucking frog mascot that we have. It was just so unusual and unique. It’s just become its own thing.
A lot can happen in a decade. What are the main ways in which you’ve changed?
Writing is a reflection of life, and when you write music or lyrics it has to come from a real place. I’m not a genre fan. I don’t listen to any bands that sound like Dillinger Escape Plan or Every Time I Die — I’ve never even heard a full record of theirs. I don’t advocate that anyone should listen to Dillinger Escape Plan. I selfishly make music because it’s something that I need to do, to get out of me.
So, nine years ago for me as a human being… Psychologically, I’m nowhere close to that person [I was on the last Dillinger record]. So, when we started making this record, it’s not just about like, Can I still scream? It’s about, Do I have anything to say in this realm? Screaming should be about intensity. So, do I really have anything to say that warrants having exclamation points at the end of it? If otherwise, I’m a fucking fraud — and I’m causing a problem. Either I have exclamation points or I don’t.
So how did you manage to figure out what you wanted to say?
It’s very difficult, right? Back when Dillinger was going on and I was writing from that perspective, I was very depressed. I had a lot of anxiety. I had a lot of frustration and a lot of anger, and I don’t have that anymore. I’m not that person. I’ve overcome all that.
My biggest fear was being a fraud. What I don’t want to do is put on a costume and be writing lyrics from a perspective of another time, or another person. I really had to dig to find whatever was left in there to be pissed about, to be depressed about, to be angry about, to be energetic about. Some of that might mean putting yourself in someone else’s shoes, or writing from someone else’s perspective. You do what you got to do to get the material out. And for me, it was just about not being fake. All I can tell you is that everything I wrote about is real — but everything I wrote about was very difficult to get to at the same time. I don’t have as much in that tank as I did when I was in my twenties or early thirties.
If that’s the case, what might that mean for the lifespan of Better Lovers?
Why do I need to think about the next record? I’m not a careerist. I don’t need to worry about that. I do what I do because it’s honest. I think the people that care about me care because I’m honest. I’m not trying to be a fucking cartoon character.
When you’re young, you start a band, and you’re like, “We’re going to be the biggest band in the world.” You have all these careerist goals. As you get older, you start to hone in more on who you are as an artist. And if you’re worth a fuck as an artist, you start to make decisions based on being more artistic and less commercial. You’re willing to say, “Hey, I’m not going to be what you knew me as three years ago, because I’m this now.” And I don’t know who I’m going to be in three years. I don’t know who Jordan’s going to be in three years. I don’t know who Will, Mitch or Goose are going to be in three years. Maybe it won’t yield anything. Maybe this is the only album we have. Who fucking knows? Maybe we have five more. I don’t know. But every album has to be the real intersection of us, or else you’re a fucking product. I have no interest in trying to chase the dragon of commerciality.
All I know is I love our record. In two or three years, whatever we write together is going to be genuine, too — or else it’s just not going to happen.