ehh, I also listened to this when it was cum tributes. Ryan Adams is amazing Love Is Hell era but could never get past Tay Tay's cheesy lyrics.
if youre just talking post-actbld (i thought you were including actbld, my favorite album ever) common existence is a bit of a side step but you should give more time to no dev
I know for a while when bands like Asking Alexandria, We Came As Romans, Of Mice & Men were starting up / blowing up, I was drifting away from AP because the users were so vocal of their displeasure towards those artists in every thread possible, but I think The Word Alive had a lot of attention in the opposite way on here because Telle was pushing hard for a minute to get a thumbs up from Jason or something like that. It was kind of weird. I think more often than not the stigma effect would make me just not want to post about a band I enjoy because I didn't want people to come at me invalidating my music opinion in another thread- "ur the guy that listens to xxxx, lol no 1 should take music advice from u". If the opinion was bad enough that it riled up the entire website + other people in the scene (Buddy Nielsen, prime example), I definitely didn't ever want to try to get into bands in the Brokencyde vein... but aside from that, I didn't really allow AP to sway my opinion on an artist too much usually. In fact, sometimes I scratch my head at just how much people enjoy certain artists on here. Future is the main one. I just can't understand the hype he gets lol.
I still think SRAR is more enjoyable than AB/AP which went farther in the direction of the things I didn't enjoy about SRAR. I also enjoyed that wave of post-hardcore music quite a bit even if I mock myself for enjoying the "sceenie weenie" stuff. Listened to a newer The Word Alive track after listening to some of the stuff on Deceiver on Spotify and boy was it bad.
I really liked Deceiver. The EP prior to it was super enjoyable too. Everything after it was just so bland. I think most of those bands approached the change to being more of a "hard rock" band rather than a borderline "metalcore" band in such a boring way. But, they continue to gather fans so my opinion is probably a minority one.