Beach Bunny stay tried and true on ‘Emotional Creature’
Love sucks. It’s also the best thing in the world. It’s the stuff that makes you crazy enough to scream, sometimes filled with joy and sometimes filled with anger. Love is universal, and until the big star in the sky burns out for good, we’ll all be dealing with it on an everyday basis. That makes love potent material for writing songs – in fact, you can’t throw a stone without hitting ten love songs on the way. With over 100 years of love songs to contend with, the trick is not to get bogged down by expectations. That’s the lesson Beach Bunny took to heart on their sophomore LP, Emotional Creature.
Featuring 12 songs of peppy pop punk guitar rock all centred around love, both good and bad, the Chicago outfit blaze a path by staying tried and true. Emotional Creature is easy to take in and admittedly not terribly deep – there aren’t any massive metaphors or complicated detours to parse through in order to understand what lead singer Lili Trifilio is getting at. That lack of complications might not seem like a selling point, but it absolutely is.
That’s because Beach Bunny hunker down and deliver the goods. Through the barrage of cymbal crashes, fuzzy power chords, and sunny melodies, the band blast out memorable tracks like they could make them in their sleep. Whether they’re taking on the positive side (‘Entropy’, ‘Oxygen’), the negative side (‘Deadweight’, ‘Weeds’), or somewhere in between (‘Scream’), there’s always a catchy vocal line and a fist-pumping backing track ready to get lost in.
Beach Bunny managed to make ragged charm their most potent weapon on their debut LP, 2020’s Honeymoon. That album was quick, punchy, and seemingly recorded in the back of a defunct Circuit City (at least it sounds that way sometimes). Thankfully, a new polished sound and tighter arrangements don’t sacrifice any of that same charm on Emotional Creature.
It’s been almost half a decade since the viral success of the band’s debut single ‘Prom Queen’, but nothing on Emotional Creature seems to be pandering towards anything like viral stardom. The most refreshing aspect of Emotional Creature is that Beach Bunny are now fully confident in their identity as a band, whether any casual fans or scrolling newbies want to care or not.
There’s nothing complex about what drummer Jon Alvarado, guitarist Matt Henkels, and bassist Anthony Vaccaro are doing throughout Emotional Creature. Just a few chords and some straightforward arrangements are all that these songs need in order to connect, and the major pull of the band’s sound is that ego and flash never factor into their compositions. The members of Beach Bunny are great musicians, and great musicians know how to serve their songs.
In fact, the first sign that the band are interested in creating a sound outside of their established comfort zone comes on ‘Gravity’, a floaty synth-pop song that plays into the space rock and Star Wars fandom that the band have been playing with in their recent music videos. It’s just a quick instrumental interlude, but it could represent a new future for the band, especially since the next track, ‘Scream,’ features prominent synths and electronic drums. It doesn’t take long for the group to return to guitar rock, but it’s an interesting thought exercise to start thinking about the future.
It’s appropriate that the record ends with a literal ‘Love Song’, considering how we’ve spent half an hour taking in love song after love song. Instead of being just another track in the sequence, this time, Beach Bunny sprawl out for their ultimate summation of confusing feelings and heavenly joy. It’s the perfect ending to an album that sets its sights on a very specific target and nails it each and every time. We even get some reprises of ‘Entropy’ and ‘Fire Escape’, just to tie the entire album together.
Even if these are familiar beats, Beach Bunny hit them all with a new level of confidence and self-assuredness that it’s impossible not to get swept up in the sing-along choruses and infectious blasts of energy. More than anything else, Emotional Creature is a damn fun ride, even when it’s trying to parse through anxiety and heartbreak. That’s the magic of great pop-punk, but Beach Bunny are finally transcending that limiting genre tag. Now and forever, Beach Bunny are making Beach Bunny music.
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