Professional ratings
Aggregate scores
Source	Rating
Metacritic	(86/100)
Review scores
Source	Rating
Allmusic
Big Cheese	(8/10)
Front Magazine
The Guardian
The Irish Times
Kerrang!	(5/5)
Metal Hammer	(9/10)
NME
Q
Rock Sound	(9/10)

The Blackest Beautiful is the third studio album by American post-hardcore band letlive. It was released by Epitaph Records on July 9, 2013. Recorded between June 2012 and January 2013, the album used four different drum sessions, and went through ten recording engineers before settling on Stephen George. The drums were recorded with session musician Christopher Crandall, in the absence of the band having a permanent drummer at the time. The album incorporated a variety of music styles based on its members, including punk rock, funk, and soul; it was mastered and mixed to have a "more human" and "organic" sound.

Although the album was not expected to sell well because it was streamed for free prior to release, it still debuted in the United States at number 74 on the Billboard 200 and number six on the Hard Rock Albums chart, with nearly five thousand copies sold. The band toured the United Kingdom and Ireland to support the album, and joined other bands on tours across the United States. Critics welcomed the album, praising its crisp production and forward-thinking sound within post-hardcore, with Metacritic giving an aggregate rating of "universal acclaim".

Jason Aalon Butler, the band's front-man and remaining founding member, described the group's first releases, extended play Exhaustion, Saltwater, And Everything In Between (2004) and debut album Speak Like You Talk (2005), as "educational experiences" in writing whole songs rather than "cool bits" for songs. Music journalist Andrew Kelham wrote that the era these "raw hardcore punk" records were produced in was plagued by "potential [that] was never realised as an ever-revolving door of musicians cause the band to limp through Jason's late teens and early twenties." With the second album, Fake History, the band felt they found their "signature sound". In 2008, when performing as a substitute opening support band for Bring Me the Horizon's show in Los Angeles, they caught the attention of Brett Gurewitz, owner of Epitaph Records, who later signed the band and re-released their second album in 2011.

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Wikipedia