The World is a Beautiful Place & I Am No Longer Afraid to Die (The World is a Beautiful Place, The World is, or TWIABP for abbreviating purposes) isn’t just a band with a name that would never fit on a marquee; it’s also a band that would never fit into one specific genre. They’ve been labeled as emo, indie, soft rock, and about a zillion other subgenres, but there’s an obvious problem with trying to place the band into any one category: it’s always changing.

For the last six years, the New England-based group has seen an ever-flowing rotation of members, which has shaped the band’s sound and style for each of its many releases. Some artists might consider four EPs in a six-year span to be “many,” but TWIABP is constantly working on new material, creating at least one album, EP or split every year since founding (often two or three).

With the group’s most recent full length (Harmlessness) releasing last week, Myspace chatted with guitarist, vocalist, and co-founder Derrick Shanholtzer-Dvorak about the new album, the “emo revival” and (obviously) that mouthful of a band name.

What do you think of the new record?

I’m really proud of the record. I think it’s a lot more focused than the last one (2013’s Whenever, If Ever). It’s a 50-minute long double LP, so there’s a lot on there. So far, the response from everyone has been really overwhelming. 

The band is known for having a very fluid lineup, how does that affect the music?

Well, we’re never out of ideas. There’s always someone coming in with a different approach. We all listen to a wide range of music, so it’s really the sound of all of our own ideas. It’s not one person who’s coming up with everything; it’s everyone in the group.

I have to ask…how did the name come about? 

We named the band as a joke that me and the old vocalist (Thomas Diaz) made while making music and being drunk in a garage. We put on a disc of whale sounds and started talking over it. We joked that we’d call ourselves The World is a Beautiful Place & I Am No Longer Afraid to Die, so when this group came about, it was just like “Well, you know what we have to call it…” 

The World Is gets lumped in a lot with the term “emo revival.” Do you think “emo” is an appropriate word to describe the group?

It’s weird to see press outlets covering stuff that me and my friends are doing and have been doing for years. We all grew up listening to groups like Knapsack, Sunny Day Real Estate and At the Drive-In. It was cool in 2008 and 2009 when the band started to play shows in basements and we could see that we weren’t the only ones into music like that. The press picked up the term “emo revival” but no one in it ever called it that. At this point, I get tired of hearing it. In the mid-’90s, the press used the term post-emo indie rock, but it’s all just melodic rock songs with the aggression of emo to hardcore music.

How’d the band start, and how has it changed since then? 

Tom (Diaz) and I used to play solo shows together, and we would play on each other’s songs. We basically decided we wanted to do a bunch of stuff with delay pedals and making different sounds. Now, I think we just got used to rehearsing under the mentality that there are no rules. Our live shows are just a lot of improvisation and whatever sounds good. 

You just put out a new album, what’s next? 

Well, I’m shipping the records from my house, so that’ll be a nightmare for the next week or so. Then we’ll be rehearsing for our fall tour and maybe recording some spooky sound effects stuff for Halloween, but I’m not sure if we’ll actually do that. Then we go to Europe with MewithoutYou,

Harmlessness just came out and you’re already talking about a Halloween record. How does The World Is continue to put out so much music all the time? 

We really never rehearse old music. We get together and we write new music. We started writing Harmlessness as soon as the last one came out, and we’re probably sitting on 20 unreleased demos and ideas right now. They may never come out, but we always have them. We want to keep writing new music, and there’s no one to tell us not to.