Jeff VanderMeer on The Dears:
“The Dears have made some of the most beautiful music of the past quarter century, but also some of the most defiant, with an attitude and emphasis that seems to blend the operatic with a punk sensibility. If I love The Dears, if you love The Dears, it’s because that orchestral, symphonic feel, those gorgeous melodies, are grounded in a gritty, gonna-die-on-this hill mentality and a heady intellectualism. I’ve written several novels while listening to The Dears and it’s almost always heightened the atmosphere I need when I’m writing about real, ordinary people trying to take on the world or some system that’s trying to keep them down or even kill them. It’s always that charge of the light brigade into the teeth of mortality or some other enemy that maybe you can’t defeat, but you can understand yourself and the world better in trying, and feel better about your place in it.
“Meaning in music lies somewhere in that space between the creator and the listener, and what they create together, and on “Life is Beautiful,” The Dears are again at the top of their form, coming back with passionate, compassionate, urgent music that uplifts, explores dark corners, and ultimately shines out in a way that’s absolutely gorgeous, with an edge. I find listening to The Dears a transcendent experience, and I have to say my heart skipped a beat from the opening chords of “Gotta Get My Head Right”—a masterpiece of rising tension and killer melodies, layered and precise and yet roving and wild, with changes in the music and the progressions that alter your brain while listening. I also feel that the track teaches you how to listen to the album as a whole—by building and building, and then opening up into a wider space two-thirds of the way through, generously introducing the whole rest of the album through its constant questing motion.
“What follows is an album that’s as various and yet as unified as that first track. Few bands can achieve this kind of complexity while also making it seem timeless and so very perfect. I loved having that dark swell of orchestral brilliance balanced with adjacent styles in songs like “Deep in My Heart” and “Dead Contacts,” both of which convey a more direct kind of happiness by way of the music, for lack of a better way of saying it. By the time we get to “Tears of the Nation,” with its pulsing, hypnotic beat, we’re ready for what “down in the darkness / will be revealed / under the light.” But we’re also ready for a song like “Life Is Beautiful,” which is strangely uplifting even as it acknowledges pain and loss, the music itself so gorgeous it emphasizes the titular refrain over and above the darkness.
“Have I mentioned that sometimes The Dears convey a kind of neon-lights-on-asphalt and midnight noir feel, by way of a more intricate or personal Roxy Music? Because they do. (It’s hard to mention other bands when talking about The Dears, to be honest, because I always tend to compare other bands to The Dears, rather than the other way around, and even that is difficult because no one really sounds like The Dears. And that’s the reason they’ve been compared to Radiohead and Gainsbourg among others—because people like comparisons, but fail utterly in using them when encountering something new.)
“If we think of these songs as a series of character portraits conjured up by The Dears, in addition to being from the songwriter personally, then they’re a collection of people trying to get by, but also trying to figure out their place in the world, and how to do right by the world—either politically or personally, especially as the two things aren’t separate these days. Some of them are beautiful losers, others are just eccentric or have the usual fears and hopes people have. In this sense, The Dears’ music feels immediate, down-to-earth, but with real emotions, even as the music is often ecstatically layered, complicated and rich. The music, in a sense, conveys the complex inner life of the songwriter and the people composer Murray A. Lightburn writes about. The songs are generous in this way—they give people the benefit of the doubt, they acknowledge the uncertain entangled largeness of the world.
“I first heard The Dears listening to “Summer of Protest” and was just blown away by the sound, the snarling weight of Murray’s voice, the perception of the lyrics. But I soon learned their entire catalogue was thrilling, energizing, sui generis. “Life Is Beautiful! Life Is Beautiful! Life is Beautiful!” feels like a new masterpiece and provides further evidence that The Dears are a vital part of the musical landscape, and also just completely doing their own thing, as ever. There’s no one like The Dears and there never will be, and I really appreciate that so very much.”
“Life Is Beautiful! Life Is Beautiful! Life is Beautiful!” is the 9th studio album from Montreal-based rock group The Dears will be released 7 November, 2025. Pre-save the album here.