FEATURE:
Spotlight
PHOTO CREDIT: Artimio Blackburn
that were conducted this year that perfectly introduce Beach Bunny and their work. Even though they formed in 2015, I still think that a lot of people do not know about them. Their second studio album, Emotional Creature, was released on 22nd July. Formed in Chicago, Beach Bunny were founded by Lili Trifilio (vocals, guitar, songwriter, and lyricist). She is joined in the group by Jon Alvarado (drums, 2017–present), Matt Henkels (guitar, 2017–present) and Anthony Vaccaro (bass, 2019–present). I will finish with a review for the amazing Emotional Creature. Before that, I will start with a Stereogum interview that was published back in March. I am a very new convert to the band, so this interview made for fascinating reading. I have selected some segments of the interview that I feel are especially important and illuminating:
“After recording all day, Beach Bunny are taking a break with a dozen warm beignets. Lili Trifilio opens a paper bag to share them with everyone in the room — guitarist Matt Henkels, drummer Jon Alvarado, bassist Anthony Vaccaro, producer Sean O’Keefe, and me — and a cloud of powdered sugar poofs into the air. It’s a suspiciously warm spring day for Chicago, but they’re happily holed up indoors to track their sophomore album, Emotional Creature, which will be released July 22 on Mom+Pop Music. While everyone bites into a pastry to fuel another six hours in the studio, O’Keefe wheels around in his chair with an excited look on his face. “I posted a story of you on Instagram and Butch Vig just messaged saying he loves Beach Bunny!” It’s the fifth response O’Keefe has gotten like that today from his music industry peers, including one from Johnny Minardi, the Vice President of A&R at Elektra Records. O’Keefe seems a little taken aback, as if he knew Beach Bunny’s appeal is hard to resist, but that their reach is something he hasn’t seen in a while.
PHOTO CREDIT: Nina Corcoran
“Oh wow, that’s cool!” Vaccaro says, and the rest of the band nods in agreement. O’Keefe pauses for a moment, one hand on the mixing board. It looks like he’s unsure what the best way to drive home how huge that compliment is. “You know who he is, right? Garbage drummer? Produced Nevermind?” he continues.
“Yeah! That’s really nice of him!” says Trifilio in her usual cheery voice. There’s no disinterest or air of coolness clinging to these responses. It just comes across like Beach Bunny themselves don’t quite know what to do with their fame. To be fair, they’re situated at an interesting place: big enough to be well-liked by just about everyone, from preteens to their parents, but small enough where the fact they can even make a living off their art still comes as a shock. That’s the weird part about being a DIY band that suddenly blows up.
Trifilio formed Beach Bunny as a solo project back in 2015. After wanting to give music a whirl for years but hesitating due to the intimidating nature of the industry, she finally decided to record an EP of original indie-pop songs, Animalism, from the comfort of her childhood bedroom in Chicago. Trifilio was just 18 at the time, but the fact she pulled it off by herself excited her. She set to work recording follow-up EPs in college, 2016’s Pool Party and 2017’s Crybaby. Eventually Trifilio scouted three musicians to join her under the moniker so she could enter a local battle of the bands, which denied entry to solo acts. They spent three months rehearsing for the contest, and their ensuing collaborative spirit convinced Trifilio to turn Beach Bunny into a proper band. The quartet sat down to record their 2018 EP Prom Queen shortly afterwards, and they became a local tour-de-force in the process, with most everyone in Chicago rooting for them. By the time Trifilio was about to graduate with a journalism degree, Beach Bunny had stepped into the studio with Joe Reinhart of Hop Along to record their excellent debut album Honeymoon, overflowing with sugary vocal hooks and alt-rock tinged guitars. Anyone who wasn’t previously won over finally caved.
It helps that BeachBunny make it easy to cheer for them. Trifilio sings candidly about personal struggles and teenage insecurities that are timelessly relatable, and her bandmates bring the revved up flair that makes otherwise simple power-pop feel so energetic and polished. Beyond the music, all four members are unpretentious kids who grew up paying their dues and expecting nothing for it. Trifilio was a cashier at her local pizza shop Armand’s; Henkels worked behind the counter at Panera Bread; Alvarado flipped Whoppers as a fry cook at Burger King; and Vaccaro, who joined the band in 2019 following original bassist Aidan Cada’s departure, landed jobs at Best Buy and his local record store. From day one, Beach Bunny have captured the everyday joy, misery, and awkwardness of youth — particularly that of your average teenager — with surprising grace. Their songs are confessional without the usual melodrama, honest without the accompanying cringe, level-headed without getting preachy.
It’s easy to imagine their surprise, then, when Beach Bunny became TikTok-famous thanks to “Prom Queen,” the titular EP’s lead single about learning to ignore unrealistic beauty standards. Thousands of teenagers were filming themselves grappling with self-hatred, body fat, and acne to the song’s simple refrain: “Maybe I should try harder/ You should lower your beauty standards.” The song’s music video racked up 20 million views. Beach Bunny were launched into the pages of The New Yorker and Paper Magazine, where they were lauded with praise. They landed sets at festivals like Lollapalooza and Pygmalion. A sea of fans started populating every social media account the band had, responding to each Instagram picture and tweet Trifilio posted. Someone even started a Beach Bunny subreddit and Instagram fan account to archive their every move.
Listen to any Beach Bunny record and it’s obvious Trifilio has an innate knack for melody and lyrics, but the extent to which she’s grown over the past two years also highlights how much more she has to offer that she hasn’t revealed yet. “Lili is a decisive, creative person and one of the best songwriters I’ve worked with,” says O’Keefe. “She knows exactly what she wants. If something is not right, we keep searching till we find it. And when it’s found she moves on without second guessing. That’s something you don’t see very often. And then on top of all of that, she has an extraordinary voice. It’s a hard combo to beat. I know that Lili writes songs about topics that are personal and meaningful to her. When you’re in her position, there can be a lot of pressure to steer your writing in other directions to satisfy outside people, and I never once saw her entertain those ideas. As a music fan, those are the types of songs I want to hear.”
Trifilio’s vision is so clear that she even has a full-blown sci-fi aesthetic plotted for the album rollout. She’s been indulging in everything from older classics like Star Trek and Barberella to newer staples like Dr. Who and Watchmen. (Note the Dr. Manhattan lookalike sweeping Trifilio through space on the “Oxygen” single art.) In the studio, she’s busy jotting down ideas and drawing possible renderings for artwork, merch, and music videos. “I’m training to become the first jedi to write pop bangers,” she later jokes on Instagram. For Trifilio, visuals aren’t a way to explain her lyrics or sell the music. Instead, she’s taking after some of her biggest pop idols — Marina And The Diamonds, Charli XCX, Grimes — by prioritizing visuals as an exercise in fun. “None of these songs are about outer space or aliens or anything. It’s just fun to have an excuse to explore a new style because you’re changing along with the music you’re writing and so are your interests beyond music,” she says. “There’s definitely a degree of escapism there, especially compared to Honeymoon, which was based in reality”.
The entire group are wonderful and compelling, but I think there is something about lead Lili Trifilio that is especially fascinating. A wonderful songwriter and voice, this interview from The New York Times is one I would recommend people read in full. It seems that the pandemic has been responsible for each Bunny’s music reaching a much wider and larger audience:
“One morning last August, Lili Trifilio was feeling emotional.
“I’m honestly so nervous,” the singer-songwriter, then 24, admitted, her voice rising as she shook her head. It was the day before her indie-rock band Beach Bunny would headline a sold-out show at the Music Hall of Williamsburg in Brooklyn. Beach Bunny’s recent success had seemed abstract to Trifilio, since most of it had happened during lockdown, on the internet, but the group’s biggest New York show to date would make it tangible.
“Over the pandemic, Beach Bunny has grown like 200 percent,” Trifilio continued, between sips of an iced Nutella mocha latte at a cafe not far from the venue, “and I don’t know what to expect.”
Trifilio has a wide, toothy smile and a choppy bobbed haircut that she likes to dye different colors — magenta, lilac, rust — though that day it was a naturalistic blonde. Onstage, she’s known for her bubbly, earnest positivity; at a recent Beach Bunny show, she gave an enthused recommendation for a local vegan restaurant, urged the audience to get their Covid-19 booster shots and led the entire crowd in singing “Happy Birthday” to a fan. On albums she’s known for the emotional lucidity of her songwriting, which seems to trap fleeting feelings in shimmery amber.
Beach Bunny’s music has plenty of admirers outside of the TikTok demographic, too. The actor Bob Odenkirk discovered the band several years ago while flipping through The Chicago Tribune, and he “immediately dug them,” he wrote in an email, because he found their sound to be “connected to the indie rock that I loved from the days of yore,” like Pixies, Sebadoh and the Cavedogs. He’s since become a vocal fan and even made a cameo in Beach Bunny’s recent “Star Wars”-spoofing video for the song “Entropy.”
“I’m an older white guy, and her lyrics are about longing and written from a female perspective,” Odenkirk added. “But I still feel very connected to the pain and estrangement of my 14-year-old self, and I always will.”
On the new album, piercing pop-punk tunes like “Gone” and “Deadweight” challenge emotionally ambivalent partners to wear their hearts on their sleeves. “You’re a diamond/Wish you could see you the way I see,” Trifilio sings on the mid-tempo rocker “Weeds,” during a chorus that offers loving advice to a heartbroken friend — or perhaps the singer herself. Writing the album, she said, helped her to confront her history of “shame around feeling big emotions.”
“That was, like, a therapy moment,” she said. “‘Wow, you have a lot of shame around being an emotional person, even though every human has feelings.”’
Trifilio has since come around on TikTok, too. “There is definitely a young girl audience, mostly coming from TikTok, with very little experience of even attending shows,” she said. “They tell me, ‘This is one of my first shows,’ and I’m like, ‘That’s amazing. I hope you go to so many more’”.
I want to finish things off with a review from Rolling Stone of Beach Bunny’s new album, Emotional Creature. If you have not heard their 2020 debut, Honeymoon, then I would definitely advise that you do. It is an amazing introduction, but I feel Emotional Creature is an even stronger work. This is what Rolling Stone had to say about it:
“‘Cause somebody’s gonna figure me out / It’s what I am, it’s what I was, It’s what I wanna become,” Beach Bunny’s Lili Trifilio sings with resignation on “Entropy,” the opener of the band’s striking sophomore album. The line has a double meaning: She yearns for the liberation that will come from no longer needing to hide a clandestine relationship, but it also underscores the bandleader’s confidence in knowing exactly what she wants. The song is the epitome of Trifilio’s growth as both a person and a songwriter—and representative of the power she’s found in embracing her emotions. And it’s what fuels Beach Bunny’s latest effort Emotional Creature.
For the past few years, the Chicago indie rockers have skyrocketed to fame in part as TikTok darlings —thanks to tracks like “Prom Queen” and also “Cloud 9” from their critically-acclaimed 2020 debut Honeymoon. For most artists, finding a large audience on the platform can be a mixed bag. It’s easy to be written off as another internet band because of “the algorithm,” but sometimes it’s the launching pad needed for hard-earned recognition. With Honeymoon, and now Emotional Creature, Beach Bunny has shown that they more than deserve to be taken seriously, but also that their cathartic connection to TikTok teens has been invaluable.
Trifilio’s overwhelming empathy has become a hallmark of her work, as she’s navigated teen trauma like longing, heartbreak, body image and ghosting through twee garage-pop songs. And on Emotional Creature (their second release for Mom + Pop Music), she ascends beyond those themes with even more of an open-hearted approach, delivering plainspoken missives of quarter-like crises that include crippling anxiety, toxic relationships and self-discovery.
Emotional Creature is Nineties rom-com core at its finest. Barreling through the album’s 12 songs, it’s easy to envision Trifilio’s equally ebullient and wistful vocals soundtracking the ups and downs of romantic entanglements in everything from 10 Things I Hate About You to Never Been Kissed. It’s not surprising when you consider that Beach Bunny’s jangly power-pop evokes the sweet but biting timbre of Letters to Cleo’s Kay Hanley—particularly when she’s cosplaying Josie from Josie and the Pussycats—as well as vulnerable contemporary bands like Charly Bliss and Camp Cope.
As a bird’s eye view of Trifilio’s heightened emotional states, Emotional Creature kicks off with all-consuming highs with the euphoric “Oxygen,” fueled by Trifilio’s soaring serotonin-boosted vocals. “Suddenly everything is easy/ I’ve never felt something so deeply/ ‘Cause with you, with you, I breathe again,” she exhales over raucous guitar fuzz. anthems like the bombastic “Fire Escape” and heart-fluttering “Karaoke” capture the intoxicating beginnings of a new relationship, detailing precious moments like carving your names into a subway seat and radio sing-a-longs on hometown drives. On the downtempo rock cut “Love Song,” a starry-eyed Trifilio is finally self-assured about her partner for what feels like the first time. “It’s funny how we move through space and time/Sometimes I think I’ve known you all my life,” she sings with a dreamy lilt.
Trifilio particularly shines on the heavier points of the record, such as “Eventually,” where she paints an unfiltered portrait of a panic attack. Those lows could be purely defeating, but she turns them into moments of resilience. On the sticky tune “Weeds,” there’s a newfound emotional maturity in the way Trifilio realizes how she deserves to be treated. “I’m tired of giving, giving, living like a lady in distress/But I don’t need someone to save me/Not your polly pocket in your lover’s locket/You can’t hold me down/I’m a bursting bottle rocket,” she asserts. Likewise, there’s a silent confidence in Trifilio’s apathetic attitude toward a difficult partner on the glittery pop-punk cut “Deadweight.” “You always get what you want/But I’m not someone who waits to feel love/Because I think I’ve waited enough,” she delivers like a kiss-off.
“Scream” is Emotional Creature’s Eighties synth-tinged centerpiece—and the standout of the record—where you can envision Trifilio fully letting go, driving in a convertible with the top down, the breeze gently blowing through her hair. “I feel confused by, what I’m ashamed for/I feel ashamed by, my human nature/Choose to adapt new outward behavior,” she declares, shaking off the shame of her feelings over a swirl of psychedelic guitar riffs.
It’s empowering to see Trifilio own the full spectrum of her emotions, and it’s what cements Beach Bunny’s latest record as a masterclass in confessional rock and roll”.
A brilliant American band who are coming to the U.K. later in the year, I am excited to see where they head next. Everyone should have them on their radar, as I predict they will be huge very soon. Emotional Creature is one of the best albums of the year so far. If you have not followed and heard Beach Bunny, then make sure that you…
CORRECT that now.
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