Most bands don’t age gracefully. After a decade or two, many lose their urgency, their momentum, their emotional range, and never reignite that which made them special. The opposite is true of The Casket Lottery, whose 2020 full-length Short Songs for End Times showcases a band at their best—their tightest, toughest, most intense—and more than twenty years after their first release. It’s still easy to hear the hallmarks that have defined the Kansas City-band for decades—the heat, the tension, the smoke so thick it’s hard to see the fire, and it’s clear that The Casket Lottery, who shaped midwestern emo’s transition into post-hardcore two decades ago, has improved with age. They have released three albums to date - Emersion (2015), Apocryphal Gravity (2017) and Metempsychosis (2020) - and are releasing their fourth upcoming album The One Above in February 2023. They have gained relative popularity following the release of their second album after their took a drastic change in their musical approach and method of composing. The band sets forth a musical style rarely explored to this day, breaching pre-established post-rock conventions by incorporating both electronica and progressive rock-metal influences. Their music was critically acclaimed and aroused the interest of almost over one million eager listeners on the internet as well as being the subject of many press articles. The band’s third album Metempsychosis was awarded the best post-rock album of 2020 by the independent music YouTube channel Wherepostrockdwells