letlive. - The Blackest Beautiful Revisited

letlive.
The Blackest Beautiful - Revisited
Release Date: June 13th, 2025
Original Release Date: July 9th, 2013
Label: Epitaph

In 2013, letlive. release The Blackest Beautiful, a landmark album in post-hardcore, and maybe the best album of that year. Despite using a test mix as the final mastered mix on the album, making the quality of these raucous, transcendent songs sound like they were recorded on a potato with a microphone attached to it, it didn’t matter - the songs were outstanding. Pairing explosive tracks like “Banshee (Ghost Fame)”, “White America’s Beautiful Black Market”, and the epic “27 Club” with the frantic energy of Jason Aalon Butler, screaming his way through songs with equal parts soul and madman, it is an album that stands out amongst the crowd.

Eleven years later, the band announced a slew of reunion shows, with the run concluding at this year’s When We Were Young Festival in Las Vegas - a performance that is surely going to find Butler climbing up the lighting trusses behind the stage and adding a bit more to the festival’s insurance liability plan. To commemorate the reunion after nearly a decade in silence, the band did the unthinkable and released The Blackest Beautiful - Revisted, a newly mixed version of the album that finally fixes one of the weakest parts of this collection of songs.

The mix is much cleaner, bringing Butler’s vocals, Christopher Crandall’s drums, Jeff Sahyoun and Jean Francisco Nascimento’s guitars, and Ryan Jay Johnson’s bass lines front and center, sounding like separate entities rather than one squashed being. Moments like the opening on “Banshee (Ghost Frame)” hit so much harder than now, and that energy remains all the way through delicate tracks like “Virgin Dirt”, “The Dope Beat”, and “27 Club”. The newly minted version of The Blackest Beautiful features new renditions of “The Dope Beat” and “27 Club”. The former features a vocal appearance and new verse from Dan “Soupy” Campbell of The Wonder Years, while the latter features a verse from Keith Buckley (ex-Every Time I Die). They fit right at home on this frenetic masterpiece of an album.