Released on 22 July, Beach Bunny’s newest album has been described by Rolling Stone as “Part Nineties Rom-Com, Part Tiktok-Era Indie-Pop Breakthrough“. They are absolutely right. The album charts a course through the choppy waters of a crumbling relationship, with ups and downs, and eventually a happy ending. It is a rom-com in musical form.
The tracks are similar in tempo to Beach Bunny’s previous songs such as Tiktok-beloved tune ‘Cloud 9’, but are not nearly so idyllic. Rather than simply basking in a relationship that is going well, they are from the perspective of someone who is undervalued and taken for granted by their partner. Singer and songwriter Lili Trifilio does the lyrics justice with a strong but wistful voice. Though the New York Times notes that “onstage, she’s known for her bubbly, earnest positivity”, there are many more complex emotions beneath that exterior, much like the mood of the album. “There’s actually a lot of lyrics on the record that talk about feeling ashamed of having big emotions,” she has said to InsideHook.
The first track, ‘Entropy’, is aptly named as it seems to introduce us to this relationship in which everything is uncertain and chaotic. There is no consistency and so the narrator is in stasis, riddled with anxiety. They’re begging for a moment of something calm, something different—“I’ll get over it if you let me breathe.” It is about waiting for discovery and fearing it simultaneously: “I can’t exhale, but I can’t hide / the letters in my bedroom / the way my heart’s in bloom.”
The next few songs explore the dangers of too much dependency on another person, to the point that you feel as though you rely on them to live. At surface level the second track, ‘Oxygen’, appears to be about how easy it is to be with someone—“cause with you, with you I breathe again”—but there are more layers to it. Lyrics like “baby you’re my oxygen” create a contrast with ‘Entropy’. In the first song the singer struggled to breathe, to regulate their emotions—now they can breathe freely with the help of another person. Whereas before they said “I can’t exhale, but I can’t hide / the letters in my bedroom / the way my heart’s in bloom”, now they say “I’m okay with having a few bad days / locked in my room with my heart out on display.” They have found acceptance after the panic, but at the cost of their independence. What appears to be acceptance of their fears is, in a way, just resignation to needing someone. The narrator is used by their partner, taken from and taken from until there isn’t much left. They feel, though, that they can’t be alone, and stay within the cycle of dependency that has been created.
Although the album follows a rom-com pattern in terms of plot beats, it delves so much deeper in terms of looking critically at the less healthy aspects of codependency. In both ‘Deadweight’ and ‘Weeds’, two of the strongest tracks, the narrator objectifies themselves when talking about what they are to another person: “I’m somebody’s dolly when a lover’s near but tend to crumble slowly when they disappear.” “Not your Polly Pocket in your lover’s locket.”
They are done with being a superficial thing that their lover doesn’t need or want to get to know. When they are defined by a relationship, they have no sense of self outside of it because they have given too much of themselves away. Where in ‘Entropy’ their partner was the oxygen (“I can’t release and I can’t hold in”), in ‘Deadweight’ they’re the oxygen for their partner: Llet me in and push me out again”. Every lyric is weighted with double meanings while sounding as buoyant as the band’s typical style.
The album slows and weakens ever so slightly in the middle. ‘Gravity’, ‘Scream’ and ‘Infinity Room’ are somewhat less memorable in that they feel like they make less progress within the narrative the album has been unfolding. However, the pace picks up again with ‘Karaoke’, in which the narrator no longer feels dangerously reliant on another person. There’s a sense of balance, of including the bad with the good, a more complete picture of their partner: “The silver smoke still ricochets off your lips / I breathe you in, but then cough too.”
By the final and strongest track, ‘Love Song’, they have finally found consistency within a relationship. It makes life better, but it doesn’t make them feel complete, because they already were. Rather than them relying on one another, they complement each other—“Your voice is the music, so I hum to the tune,” and “You talk like an author always reading the thoughts on my face.” The narrator has been understood at last, seen as a whole. The motif repeated throughout the album—“it all comes out eventually”—is now a comforting refrain, a ‘this shall pass’ rather than something fearful. They have been discovered but not found to be lacking.
Emotional Creature is an album packed with emotion, as are its creators, and it rarely falters in its storytelling or signature sound. Past Beach Bunny enjoyers and new listeners alike will be pulled in by it.
Words by Casey Langton
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