SPIRIT OF THE BEEHIVE - YOU'LL HAVE TO LOSE SOMETHING

For the past decade, SPIRIT OF THE BEEHIVE have honed an aesthetic like no other. They’ve chopped up samples, chewed them up, spit them back out again, baby birded it. Across four albums and a smattering of EPs, Zack Schwartz, Corey Wichlin, and Rivka Ravede have fully solidified their stance as some of rock’s weirdest and best deconstructionists. 2018’s Hypnic Jerks was a study in noise punk sampledelia. It was a breakthrough for the band. Frank Ocean became a fan, spinning “fell asleep with a vision,” on Blonded Radio. 2021’s ENTERTAINMENT DEATH, was nasty dream pop by way of K-Mart realism and hitting the channel search setting on an old TV set.

Their last release, 2023’s i’m so lucky, explored the breakup between Schwartz and Ravede, setting the stage and emotional territory for the band’s fifth record, YOU’LL HAVE TO LOSE SOMETHING. This latest offering is the most crystallized version of the band’s aesthetic, a continued meditation on the end of relationships and the unsteadiness that follows. It is a meticulous, beautiful, and quietly heartbreaking collection of songs. More often than not, it sounds like listening to a walkman from inside of a hurricane, like the YouTube videos you’d watch in bed for 18 hours straight after you break your wrist from a skateboarding accident.

The goal in making YOU’LL HAVE TO LOSE SOMETHING was to soften out some of the edges. “Less hard left turns,” says Wichlin. “We wanted to make something intentionally less antagonistic,” he jokes. In practice, this means the record has slightly fewer drastic arrangement changes, and it is more stripped down. Take “I’VE BEEN EVIL,” one of the newest songs on the record, as one such offering. It is straightforward in that its tempo is consistent, in that the song keeps us in the same place. It does not digress. It holds itself steady, with bleary-eyed guitars and hushed vocals. The song is weary, the song is a whisper. The utterance “I’ve been evil,” is like the shrug of a shoulder, a so what, ha ha. 

Less straightforward is the sublime “LET THE VIRGIN DRIVE,” a genuinely frightening pop track that anchors itself on fucked up Japanese City pop samples and a demented news clip of someone screaming. The song was originally written around the time the band was touring ENTERTAINMENT, DEATH, and took a few years to fully flesh itself out. It is like staring into the sun, like waking up in a body bag “It’s about unrequited love and making up a situation or whole life in your head,” says Schwartz of its thematic underpinning, “The other person finally ‘sees you’ and your ‘problems are solved,’ but they aren’t, really.” The song hiccups and warbles — you can hear the tape hiss, the instability, how it kind of feels like the whole song might get sucked into a black hole’s event horizon. “Heaven is a lie/cause you are earthly/and you’re alive,” Schwartz sings at the song’s outset.

YOU’LL HAVE TO LOSE SOMETHING is a record of provocations.  It wants you to think it is just normal rock ‘n’ roll music. That it is purely pleasure oriented. But beneath these intentions is a collection of songs that are as complex as ever. The Ravede-led “FOUND A BODY,” is a downtempo smoke cloud of variegated synths. “Found a body,” she sings “No one can touch me.” “SUN SWEPT THE EVENING RED,” starts out disconcertingly chipper, before breaking down into an assault of sludged out guitars, auto-tuned vocals, a flurry of strings. Like all SPIRIT records, It is music made by three distinct voices, written independently and then assembled together. Despite being written all over the globe, with Ravede in Portugal and Schwartz and Wichlin back in Philadelphia, the trio arrived at the same themes: that of the brutality of coming to terms with reality, that of what it means to lie to protect yourself and your heart.  Schwartz says he writes songs more or less in a stream of consciousness. The band listens to very little outside music when working. The result is a record that very much is its own world. Where chaos is carefully organised, where being able to ever actually chill out is totally illusory, a trick mirror.