Emerging in 2014 with their self-titled debut, Spirit of the Beehive established themselves as exemplary curators, collagists, and synthesists, drawing from psychedelic rock, metal, post-punk, and the industrial palette. With 2021’s Entertainment, Death and the 2023 EP, I’m So Lucky, the band continued to mine myriad sounds and approaches, though their melodies reflected a newfound, albeit understated, pop sensibility. With their latest album, You’ll Have to Lose Something, the group continue on this trajectory, offering some of their most rangy yet integrated material, each track toying with a notable balance between sonic exploration and hook-leaning songcraft.
Spirit of the Beehive’s aesthetic has always involved a fertile yoking of opposites – the playful and the sinister, the euphonic and the cacophonous, the stable and the anarchic. This MO is as present as ever throughout You’ll Have to Lose Something. “Let the Virgin Drive” opens with a vocoder-manipulated melody and loungey ambience that evoke any number of 1970s-era easy-listening tunes. This retro vibe soon transitions into an instrumental segment, transporting the listener, now feeling like Neo after he swallowed the red pill, into an Escher-like maze. A mixed-down voice screams, “Somebody help me”, recalling any number of “possession” films. After a blend of noise, janky accents, and mock-sappy segues, the track flows into another pop-informed verse, Zack Schwartz doing his best to play a laidback stoner narrating his travels through a postapocalyptic landscape.
“The Disruption” is built around a confluence of warped metallic sounds, militaristic drumming, static flourishes, and a plaintive vocal. The piece leaps from avant-garde pop that brings to mind Arca or Japanese maximalist Hakushi Hasegawa to uber-rhythmic segments that conjure a vandalistic Beastie Boys backed by a psilocybin-gassed Foo Fighters. “Stranger Alive” is perhaps a spoof on marching music, an alternately deconstructive and over-the-top lampooning of John Philip Sousa and the American mainstream. Meanwhile, “The Cut Depicts the Cut” is a beat-driven dystopian take, a trippy and trauma-infused elaboration on Radiohead‘s Kid A.
Spirit of the Beehive employ an MO that exists as an aesthetic analog to what the Buddhists call proliferation, what nature and society organically experience as ever-expanding diversification (the conservative’s perennial bugaboo). Or, to quote the title of Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert’s 2022 film Everything Everywhere All at Once. “Found a Body”, for example, defies categorization, Rivka Ravede’s vocal launching as faux-slowcore, epitomizing disillusioned romanticism, even as the singer flirts with a memorable hook. “Sun Swept the Evening Red”, with its schmaltzy strings and wiry metallic bursts, hybridizes a Broadway symphonic production, a Midwest carnival, and a Los Angeles graffiti party. The soundscape morphs from crystalline synth emphases to deadpan, punky sprawls and riffy passages emerging from the amorphous clamor.
“I’ve Been Evil” shows Spirit of the Beehive’s affinity for and tendency to satirize canonic pop. Schwartz’s breathy vocal is as well-paced as ever, his melody enrolling. The soundscape could’ve been plucked from a Wilco song, though as the piece unfurls, the band embrace their insurgent bent, the beat dragging or rushing, accents growing quirkier. Schwartz soon sounds less like Jeff Tweedy and more like Ariel Pink or Avey Tare/Panda Bear from Animal Collective. “1/500” points to the band’s absorption and reconfiguration of classic-rock rhythms and radio-friendly melodic movements. Schwartz could be a paranoid Elliott Smith or fidgety Paul Banks. “Earth Kit”, too, incorporates winning pop and rock formulae, albeit with a tongue-in-cheek tone, the band, as always, navigating the line between cohesion and dissolution.
Spirit of the Beehive are part of a lineage dedicated to illustrating how territorial borders, whether between genres or people, are inevitably arbitrary and contrived. Their work can be regarded as a culmination of 20th-century classical composition, free jazz, the hybridizations of the 1960s and 1970s, math/art rock, and contemporary sonic collage. They also exist at the intersection of various technological revolutions, the spirit of globalism, diversity theory, and progressive politics. If encountered with curiosity and an appreciation for the history of radicalism and experimentation, Spirit of the Beehive strike one as provocative and precise in their renderings of post-millennial life.