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There’s a regular delivery of “Weeds,” the best track from Beach Bunny’s second album An emotional creature which embodies exactly what has made them connect with countless pop musicians, music critics and a 59-year-old TV star. “You can’t hold me / I’m a broken bottle rocket,” sings Lily Trifilio. It’s a word choice you can see — after all, it doesn’t rhyme much with the “locket” and “pocket” of the preceding bars — but that doesn’t make it any less satisfying or cathartic when the lyrics are fired with a hard – earned trust.
“‘Weeds’ was … almost like me trying to wake up from self-pity, always victimizing myself, being in these toxic patterns,” says the 25-year-old musician. “I wrote it like I was my best friend having some kind of intervention.”
Over the past half-decade, Beach Bunny has taken on this role of confidant and motivator through Lilly’s desire to put her own struggles to music. In 2018, she brought in guitarist Matt Henkels, drummer John Alvarado and bassist Anthony Vaccaro after initially starting Beach Bunny as a solo project. The group gained fans in their hometown of Chicago, but rose to international prominence with the viral success of “Prom Queen,” a disarmingly candid song about the effects of unhealthy beauty standards.
The song kicked off Beach Bunny’s MO. While peanut butter pill pop songs have been around forever, the band doesn’t cloak diary lyrics about dysfunctional relationships, self-esteem and anxiety in bright tunes. The thunderous guitar chords and soaring choruses aren’t there to dampen the power, but to amplify it. Most of the songs of An emotional creature they’d be excellent if they stripped down to their bare bones and went acoustic, but they wouldn’t be as compelling as the heat-glistening hooks of “Gone” and “Scream.”
Lily and I meet on an overcast morning near her apartment in Bucktown on the Sunday before the release of Beach Bunny’s latest album. In person, she is cheerful and quick to laugh, but not overly sociable. She is contemplative without seeming too calculating. After our conversation is over, she will spend at least 45 minutes talking to all the local artists and designers who sell their work at the cafe.
She’s candid about the pressures of heightened expectations that come with the band’s skyrocketing visibility, and says she’s actually “grateful” An emotional creature was rebuffed several times. Not only did this give the band and their label, indie darling Mom + Pop, time to plan a full implementation and reshoot several music videos, but it also gave Lilly the chance to prepare to release a project that’s as candid and revelatory as ever. -the wider audience group yet.
“I had to realize that I was really obsessed with what people thought about things. With social media, we all have so much access to it, so I had to stop myself and say, ‘You wrote these songs for yourself, it doesn’t really matter what people think. You’re going to put it out anyway. Just relax,” she says. “I don’t even think anyone was putting pressure on me, I was putting pressure on myself.”
The record’s thematic heaviness is balanced by a retro-futuristic aesthetic that spans the album artwork, tour posters, as well as the videos for “Weeds” and “Entropy,” which combine to tell the story of a daring spaceship in search of and- rescue. Recalling the first star Wars trilogy, the videos are gleefully fictional, but Lilly says the otherworldly sci-fi undercurrent taps into the anxiety and uncertainty that, well, you’d have to be an alien not to have experienced in the past few years.
“It was my form of escapism and a lot of the songs were written under that – I wanted to escape from what was happening on planet Earth,” she explains.
Lily says she’s a fan of “era” artists who build a different look and feel around each piece. It’s the kind of thing most often associated with major labels with huge playing budgets, but in some ways Beach Bunny is closer to that level of notoriety than you might think. The band’s top three songs on Spotify did what can only be described as a Post Malone number. The ubiquity of ‘Prom Queen’ and ‘Cloud 9’ on TikTok certainly helped, and now their continued success coincides with the sensational resurgence of emo/pop punk. But while much of this music seems cynical and reverse-engineered, Beach Bunny is delightfully earnest. The decision to write warm, confessional indie rock wasn’t made to court playlist spots or draw comparisons to influential alternative artists.
Photography Zachary Hertzman
“I was very embarrassed once when an interviewer asked me if I listened to Liz Phair and I didn’t,” she recalls. “I really wasn’t very familiar and then in the interview they just grilled me about not knowing who Liz Phair is because she thinks that there was to be the only influence.”
In support of An emotional creature, the band has a relentless touring schedule, including what is sure to be a crowning performance at Lollapalooza and dates across Europe. There’s pressure that comes with these high-profile sets, but Lily says getting back in front of the crowd has been key in changing her perspective on the band.
“When you’re playing the numbers game, which a lot of us musicians were during the pandemic, it’s hard to even know how many people there are and whether the comments are positive or negative,” she says. “I just don’t think it’s natural for human beings to have so many opinions.”
It’s an understandable reaction, especially with music as deeply personal as what she’s written here. The album covers a wide range of feelings, from the frustration of romantic relapses to the dizzying vulnerability of falling in love with someone new, which is captured in the final three tracks. The LP even nods to Lily’s pandemic hobby of making beats on her computer with the celestial instrumental interlude “Gravity.”
“It was an homage to that period of life that I was singing about and – I feel like it didn’t do it perfectly – but I was trying to go from the first part of the album, which is really in it emotionally, that’s the middle where I have some realizations and then there’s a happy ending,” she explains.
“Weeds”, the last single before An emotional creature edition, has been in the works since 2019, when Beach Bunny was just starting to become what it is now. For Lily, it’s her favorite track on the album, in large part because her years-long journey to completion mirrors her own journey to becoming the person she is today.
“[When I wrote the song] I was like, “I hope I stop doing all these toxic things,” and while it was recorded, [felt] a feeling of relaxation, but I wasn’t quite there,” says Lily. “Now that another year has passed, I’m like, ‘Yeah, I can take a deep breath and let it go.’
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