Beach Bunny prove to be much more than a viral hit on their second studio album.
There is surely no more generational-gap-defining app than Tik Tok: beloved of teenagers worldwide, the deeply awkward spectacle of seeing grown-ups trying to emulate their children on it is never anything less than gold.
Beach Bunny was originally conceived as a solo project by Chicagoan Lili Trifilio in 2015. A handful of early EPs followed, beginning with Animalism, before line-up expansion saw the recruitment of Aidan Cada (bass), guitarist Matt Henkels and drummer Jon Alvarado. Cada was subsequently replaced by Anthony Vaccaro.
Cue Tik ToK: after growing their profile steadily, the title-track from the quartet’s Prom Queen EP blew up overnight on the platform, its theme of cutting back against social media’s vacuous portrayal of beauty resonating with millions of viewers and listeners in turn.
What followed was a debut album in Honeymoon which was both critically lauded and commercially successful, a rarity for artists catapulted into the spotlight via sources longer standing media remain at best suspicious of.
Produced by Sean O’ Keefe (Fall Out Boy, Less Than Jake) its follow-up, considering this, has something on it, but whether conscious or not there seems to have been little effort to tamper with the broad pop-punk envelope of before.
The context for Emotional Creature has a by-now familiar ring: after a spell on the road supporting Honeymoon, pandemic circumstances meant that Trifilio found herself living back at her parents’ house.
Gorging on sci-fi from The Watchmen to Barbarella, inspiration came for a vision which was expansive and escapist, even if the actual songs lyrically were not. The outcome was Emotional Creature.
It was preceded by Oxygen – included here – which will have calmed any nerves in the band’s expectant fanbase that things were set for any radical, galaxy busting change. Its strength, like the band’s, is in being simple and relatable, a choppy, bubbling take on being able to retreat from the limelight into a relationship-as-cocoon.
This formula also has the advantage of being musically familiar enough to be effectively blank; opener Entropy rings with a mid-90’s Breeders-lite kick that is, let’s face it, long due a renaissance anyway, except here the sugary coating makes the trad love song dynamic perfect to chant between lessons.
The course of whatever it is never runs true of course, so Gone needs to know, ‘If you wanna let me in, please tell me so/If you’re gonna string things out, just let me go’, whilst on Scream – as rounded as Beach Buny have ever sounded – suspicion is king: ‘My head and my heart try to rephrase the argument/As “You didn’t feel that,” now I feel gaslit’.
The same places on which you can get access to everything are also primarily responsible for ruining everyone’s attention span, so Emotional Creature having a couple of sub two-minute interludes – the starlit instrumental Gravity and Infinity Room’s Taylor-esque dreamy acoustic reflection – lands very much in the smart thinking column.
And at thirty-seven minutes and change in total, this is a record shaped to traverse the highs and lows without leaving much by way of an aftertaste.
Nothing’s truly fragmented, however. Karaoke is a wistful nod at the bar rock of their ancestors, whilst Fire Escape lives on through the ancient quiet-loud aesthetic, harder edged whilst Deadweight skips from mood to mood playfully.
For the old folks there always the feeling that Beach Bunny and their peers are the bastard children of Avril Lavigne, but Emotional Creature represents a near perfect execution of what you’d expect but also wouldn’t.
Make yourself a video, Obi-Wan: the Force is with Beach Bunny.
