Getting a good review is kind’ve like having a sexual partner brag that you have a big dick. It’s complementary –  and might drive more people into checking it out –  but it also opens you up to a new criticism: “It’s not that big.”

When Pitchfork gave …And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead’s third album Source Tags and Codes a 10 out of 10 they basically told everyone that Trail of Dead have the biggest dick in the world. 

That probably wasn’t fair to the Austin alternative rock band, who, I’ll bet, didn’t have the ambition to make the biggest-dick album of all time. 

Considering that the only other new albums Pitchfork deemed 10 out 10s include blockbusters by major artists like Fiona Apple and Kanye West, and obsessively refined big swings like Wilco’s Yankee Foxtrot Hotel, Source Tags and Codes feels like an outlier. It’s a bombastic, explosive combination of Sonic Youth, Yes, and The Who, but the band is not Sonic Youth, Yes, or The Who. 

When Trail of Dead didn’t become the saviors of rock and roll, that 10 out of 10 seemed rather preposterous…much like a really big dick that doesn’t get very hard. 

Speaking to The Ringer in 2020, Trail of Dead’s Jason Reece lamented that Pitchfork’s 10 came too early in the website’s existence to help his career, but that the 4.0 that they saddled with their next album, 2005’s Worlds Apart, with probably hurt their career, at least in the U.S. 

Not long after the release of Worlds Apart, Trail of Dead held down the opening spot on the tour for the animated parody death metal band Dethklok, a gig whose respectability must lie somewhere between playing county fairs and cruise ships. (If you’re wondering why a fake death metal band doesn’t have a real death metal band open for them, you may have just answered your own question. You never serve steak as an appetizer and tofu for the main course.)  

While Source Tags and Codes probably isn’t anyone’s idea of a 10.0 in 2026, Worlds Apart certainly isn’t as bad as a 4.0.

However…I was kind’ve hoping to come to this article to celebrate an underappreciated gem, but after listening to Worlds Apart in the context of Trail of Dead’s eleven album career, I think Pitchfork was right in describing it as a disappointing follow-up to an excellent breakthrough album. And I get why Pitchfork disliked it so much. 

Trail of Dead is a weird band for the then-snarky tastemakers at Pitchfork to celebrate. They’re earnest, overblown and far too in love with pianos, orchestration, introductions, interludes, and philosophy.

Although they began their career as a guitar-smashing, drum set-wrecking, post-hardcore band, as soon as they developed the chops, they turned into the prog rock band that they not so secretly always wanted to be. This, after all, was a band that added the ellipses and “And” to their name after deciding “You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead” was too concise. 

This was never supposed to be a band championed by hipsters. 

After a decade in which Trail of Dead tried capitalizing on the success of ST&C, released two albums to mainstream indifference and hipster disdain, tried a few too many songs that sounded like ‘90s alternative radio rock or showtunes, got dropped by their major label, and, you know, opened for Dethklok because Dethklok were afraid Cannibal Corpse would’ve blown them off the stage, Trail of Dead seemingly accepted themselves. 

Despite a little too much piano (they can’t help themselves), 2009’s Century of Self found the band maturing into a muscular hard rocking prog band. 

But they really got into fighting form with 2011’s Tao of the Dead. 

Tao wins not by scaling back the band’s pretensions (it’s called “Tao of the Dead,” after all) but by avoiding the most unpleasant aspects of their sound. You won’t hear, for instance, Conrad Keely’s unadorned voice, which torpedoed Worlds Apart. 

But even if you did, it would probably be okay, because by Tao, nearly two decades into his career, Keely had developed into a god’s honest good singer. 

The boys also avoided any ballads.

Whenever earlier iterations of Trail of Dead slowed down, their music became, well, dead. So they stopped doing that. Brilliant. 

And their experiments really landed. 

One of my favorite tracks is their longest, the 16-minute suite, ”Tao of the Dead Part II: Strange News from Another Planet,” which incorporates wailing choruses, cool tom rolls, twinkling synths, a motornik passage, a cooldown, and a pummeling outro into an entire Trail of Dead album in miniature. 

Trail of Dead have released three more albums, continuing the trajectory of Tao of the Dead. All have been critically acclaimed, including from Pitchfork. 

If I were to speculate, I think Pitchfork’s critical love up followed by its dump upon probably gave the band an identity crisis (which was no doubt aided by a major label that wanted them to sell as many records as Coldplay). 

Once the external pressures of their career and critical reputation fell away, it freed the band to become what they always wanted to be: a hard rocking prog band. 

They discovered that you don’t need the biggest dick in the world to create a whole lot of satisfaction.