Raleigh, NC · progressive metal · prog-metal · mathcore

Between The Buried And Me

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Progressive metal with no regard for song length — polka breaks, jazz detours, and genuine death-metal fury, often inside the same eleven-minute track.

Between the Buried and Me formed in Raleigh, North Carolina, in 2000, out of the ashes of two local metalcore bands, From Here On and Prayer for Cleansing. The band's name comes from a line in the Counting Crows song "Ghost Train." Their self-titled 2002 debut, released on Lifeforce Records, sold modestly but caught the attention of Victory Records.

The lineup went through several changes on guitar, bass and drums before settling by 2005 around bassist Dan Briggs and drummer Blake Richardson, who joined in time to record that year's Alaska. Vocalist and keyboardist Tommy Rogers and guitarist Paul Waggoner have anchored the band from the start, and this four-piece has remained together since.

Their music combines death metal growls and metalcore riffing with extended instrumental passages, clean vocal harmonies and detours into jazz and fusion, often shifting between all of these within a single track. Songs regularly run past ten minutes, built from abrupt stylistic swerves rather than conventional verse-chorus structure.

In 2006 the band released a covers album, The Anatomy Of, tackling songs by acts as different as Metallica, King Crimson, Pantera, Faith No More, Queen, Pink Floyd and Soundgarden, a list that maps out the range of reference points behind their own writing.

Colors, released in 2007, is widely cited as a reference point for modern progressive metal, and the band later recorded a sequel, Colors II, in 2021. They signed to Metal Blade Records in 2011 and have continued releasing albums roughly every few years, reaching eleven studio records with 2025's The Blue Nowhere, and have periodically performed full albums live from start to finish.

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progressive metalprog-metalmathcore