In Víctor Erice’s 1973 coming-of-age film The Spirit Of The Beehive, a young girl and her sister growing up in 1940s Spain see a mobile cinema’s screening of Frankenstein. “The film’s producers do not wish to present it without a preliminary word of caution,” goes the presenter’s spoken introduction. “But I would encourage you to not take it so seriously.” Six-year-old Ana takes it as gospel. Plagued by unanswerable questions – how could Frankenstein’s monster accidentally kill someone, and why would the villagers murder him in retaliation? – she sets out in search of unknowable answers. The real world’s monsters, she soon discovers, tend to hide in plain sight.
It feels a bit gauche to describe music as cinematic, as if the two mediums aren’t both avenues for evoking feeling. But there’s a clear throughline between The Spirit Of The Beehive and Spirit Of The Beehive, the Philadelphia noise-rock trio whose new album You’ll Have To Lose Something is out this Friday. Spirit Of The Beehive songs often feel as eerily alluring as a good Gothic novel or arthouse drama. It’s not monsters or murder that warrant the most fear, all these stories argue – it’s the motives and implications behind them. But where the character of Ana is just starting to crack the surface of mankind’s immorality, Spirit Of The Beehive’s narrators are often screaming from the other side, pining for minds and hearts less corrupt.
Spirit Of The Beehive released their self-titled debut album a decade ago, imbuing their relatively straightforward slacker rock with blasts of distortion that would serve as the entry point to their descent towards full-blown freakiness. They’d play with more experimentation across 2017’s melodic Pleasure Suck and 2018’s whimsical Hypnic Jerks, before arriving at 2021’s complex, misanthropic, grisly tour de force Entertainment, Death. The following year, bandmates Zack Schwartz and Rivka Ravede ended their romantic partnership, a relationship that had lasted about as long as the band itself. Spirit Of The Beehive’s 2023 EP i’m so lucky served as an immediate debriefing, reading like a string of fucked-up notes app drafts of the texts you’re tempted to pass along to your ex. Listening to those four tracks feels like entertaining the devil on your shoulder who’s whispering in your ear: “send it.” Because whatever consequences followed couldn’t be as painful as suffering in the thick of despair, right? Right?
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On You’ll Have To Lose Something, Spirit Of The Beehive zoom out a bit. “We wanted to make something intentionally less antagonistic,” the band’s Corey Wichlin says, further documentation of Spirit Of The Beehive’s fascination with villains. Opener “The Disruption” seems to shake away those combative tendencies, as knotted, warped synths signal a reckoning: “Break the spell, disenchant all the evil in your head!/ Rectify existential dread, you do not fear the dead!” proclaims guest vocalist Deedee of MSPAINT with the cadence of a protest chant, before his words are interrupted with a stark, muffled scream.
Entertainment, Death seemed to view the world as inherently hostile and paranoia-inducing; You’ll Have To Lose Something posits that the call might be coming from inside the house. On the lively single “I’ve Been Evil,” Schwartz recalibrates his moral compass in the wake of a loved one’s departure. Over winding guitar melodies, he remembers visitors to his home by nothing more than the footprints they’ve left behind, and recalls a friend who brought a gun to work for some undisclosed reason. “I wonder how close we are,” he ponders offhandedly, as if too cynical to recognize that his lack of empathy could be the deciding factor between his own life and death. Delivered in one of the album’s stickier melodies, it drives home the notion that Schwartz’s narrator is something human-adjacent; not the eight-foot creature with bolts in his neck, but a covert brute meandering among the innocent.
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“I’ve Been Evil” has hooks, as do the album’s sublime lead single “Let The Virgin Drive” and the rock-forward “Duplicate Spotted.” But more often than not, You’ll Have To Lose Something seems to use these moments of conventionality as detractors from the impossibly dark realities they exhibit: “The girls are in the basement/ It’s on the television/ Nobody could believe it,” Ravede coos on “Let The Virgin Drive,” just moments before a desperate voice in the distance screeches for help. But You’ll Have To Lose Something is probably the most chill-sounding Spirit Of The Beehive album yet, even in its moments of pure terror.
“They pulled another one out of the river/ It looked like you/ Dredged it up in the jaws of a winch,” Schwartz warbles over a stuttering, spare IDM beat on “Something’s Ending,” while “Found A Body” backdrops anxiety about the past with a laid-back sophisti-pop instrumental. You’ll Have To Lose Something may not rock out as hard as its predecessors, but its more subdued sonic palette instead acts more like an off-kilter film score, illuminating the album’s storyline instead of overwhelming it. “What if I need people?” Schwartz asks in the final line of the album’s shapeshifting closer “Earth Kit,” stretching each vowel until it oozes apprehension. It’s an otherwise fruitless question with an obvious affirmative answer. But in a Spirit Of The Beehive song, to be truly known is a treacherous endeavor. After all, aren’t the scariest monsters the ones hiding in plain sight?
You’ll Have To Lose Something is out 8/23 via Saddle Creek.
