Better Lovers guitarist Jordan Buckley on metalcore supergroup's new album, chaotic live show and the future

For Better Lovers guitarist Jordan Buckley, the title of the metalcore supergroup's debut album — "Highly Irresponsible" — appealed to him on multiple levels.

Formed last year after the dissolution of Every Time I Die, Better Lovers features Buckley, bassist Stephen Micciche and drummer Clayton "Goose" Holyoak from that band, alongside The Dillinger Escape Plan singer Greg Puciato and Fit For An Autopsy guitarist Will Putney.

"A lot of people think it's about our live shows because it is a very weird thing if you're just looking at it from outside the vacuum. There's a lot of energy," Buckley said. "There's a lot of just highly irresponsible behavior yet, but somehow minimal injuries. It's a great community. Everyone's taking care of each other. So it could be about that, I guess.

"But then again, you got a guy blowing his face off with fireworks on the cover. So it's also speaks to a living-in-the-moment attitude toward life where you don't really have time to think about it. You're just kind of so happy to be alive that you kind of don't have time to think about whether or not you're making a good decision or not. ... Starting a new band in your 40s that plays this kind of music, that's highly irresponsible in itself. It's like, I should have just got a job."

Better Lovers brings their Highly Irresponsible tour to Mr. Smalls Theatre in Millvale on Nov. 13, joined by Full of Hell, Spy and Cloakroom. After releasing their "God Made Me an Animal" EP last year, they put out "Highly Irresponsible" via Sharptone Records on Oct. 25.

Buckley said he didn't have a specific vision in mind for how the album would sound, putting full faith in the creativity of the band.

"A lot of times, magic is made when you don't plan and when you kind of just are open to receiving the frequencies that you're picking up while you're making music," he said. "So sometimes going in without a plan makes the best product, which is what we did. And I think personally, I'm just a fan of variety.

"So with it being our first record, I guess the loose plan was let's just do as many different things as we can, so we can kind of show off that we got a lot of tricks in our bag."

In an Oct. 31 call from New Jersey right before the band launched their tour, Buckley discussed launching a new band, their chaotic live shows and the future of Better Lovers:

After all the years with Every Time I Die, what were the challenges with starting a new band from scratch?

Every one you could imagine. It's a lot of hard work. It's really, really, really hard work. I was very grateful for the spot that Every Time I Die was in. We had a well-oiled machine we were running, and it's hard to make a new one. But we're doing it. It's taken two years, but we're doing it. The hardest thing is just doing the thing. ... There's so much to it, so we're just glad that we know we can kind of count on each other to be victorious over whatever challenges arise that day.

Was it important for you to get a new band going pretty soon afterwards? Was it necessary for you to be out there playing?

Yeah, I had all my time off that I needed during covid and the pandemic so to have it taken away because of that and then get it back and then have it taken away again, I was like nope. I'm not (expletive) doing this resting thing. I'm not doing this sitting around thing. Let's (expletive) go and, yeah, it was almost immediate.

A clip online of a live show features spitting flames into the crowd and stage diving. Is that every night?

Oh, no. I think if everything was too pre-planned, then it would no longer be highly irresponsible. It would be highly predictable. I think coming from the Buffalo hardcore scene when I was young and pre-phones and not many barricades, there's a sense of danger to shows that has kind of been missing. And I think the less choreographed, the less planned, the less production, makes the audience and the band have to take over and create that energy together and see what happens. I can't stand when I go see a band two nights in a row and I just see the same thing. I don't like the same setlist, the same speeches, the same. It almost looks like a dance like that. There should be some spontaneity to it, and we've played almost a hundred shows and Greg's only breathed fire at two of them, so you never really know what's gonna happen.

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It's been non-stop for the band with an EP and some singles. It seems like everything is going pretty well, right?

Everything is going great. I have no complaints. It's amazing. I'm not surprised, but I'm so grateful and so appreciative. These guys are (expletive) killers, man. Will, Steve, Goose, Greg — I knew this couldn't fail, and we won't accept failure. So it's going exactly how we want it to go, and we are just so happy. I shouldn't say it can't fail because there can be another pandemic. Once you go through one pandemic, it's always in the back of your head that, oh (expletive), this can get taken away. But these won't be any self-inflicted wounds. Natural disasters are the only things that are going to stop us.

What do you see as the future of Better Lovers?

We're here to stay. More touring. We're just a fountain of ideas, so more videos, more songs, more recordings, more touring. We're not going to be just kind of on cruise control. We're going to be just creating non-stop. I'm really excited about it. We don't even know. We were supposed to film a video today and the guy that was supposed to do it, it fell through. So now we're just like, all right, I guess we're just gonna have to (expletive) make something else today. Who knows? We're gonna go trick or treating, who knows? Maybe we'll film it ourselves.

That's the great part about being in this band is that everybody's so creative and with technology the way it is right now, we could wake up and who knows what we're gonna have by the end of the day. We're literally at a studio right now. Will's house is half a studio and half his home, so we could straight up (expletive) write and record a new song today and put it out if we wanted to. That's what I love about being in this band is that there's no shortage of creativity, so the final product is always as exciting to us as it is to you.