Between the Buried and Me

Between the Buried and Me are a five-piece metal band formed in Raleigh, North Carolina in the year 2000. The two founding members, vocalist and keyboard player Tommy Giles Rogers Jr. and lead guitarist Paul Waggoner originally met up whilst playing for the death metal band Prayer for Cleansing. After leaving Prayer for Cleansing the two men launched their new project naming it after lyrics in a Counting Crows song. They released their self-titled debut album in 2002 through Lifeforce Records and it received positive critical reviews but sold in relatively modest numbers, despite the song "Aspirations". Their second album The Silent Crisis was released in 2003 and demonstrated the band's mastery of hardcore metal. Their complex mixture of styles is attributed to an incredibly diverse range of influences and bands such as Pink Floyd, King Crimson, Queen, Soundgarden and Pantera have been cited as musical inspiration by the various members of the group. Along the decades, the band have built a relatively small but fiercely loyal following among aficionados of the various metal sub genres. Some of their most acclaimed albums, Colors (2007) and The Great Misdirect (2009), were released at the end of the decade. In 2011, they signed with Metal Blade Records and recorded the EP The Parallax: Hypersleep Dialogues, followed by the album The Parallax II: Future Sequence (2012). They continued to release notable albums such as Coma Ecliptic in July 2015, Automata I and II in 2018, and Colors II in August 2021. Throughout their career, Between the Buried and Me has toured extensively with bands like Mastodon, Children of Bodom, and Dream Theater. In 2025, the band released their twelth full-length, The Blue Nowhere.