Spirit of the Beehive: You’ll Have to Lose Something – like an arthouse horror movie in sound

The fifth album from this Philadelphia/Portugal-based trio opens, fittingly, with a track called The Disruption: this is a band known for in-song disturbances, where genres and vibes giddily supersede each other. In this instance, the sequence goes: whining guitars, lo-fi breakbeat, dour electro-indie, jacked-up rap-rock, a grainy scream.
On their 2021 album Entertainment, Death, the band perfected music that derives momentum from hairpin turns: it was a thrilling and beautiful exercise in hyper-rock (an antic, glitchy and uncanny style of guitar music that echoes the absurd tonal shifts of a social media timeline). They initially pick up where they left off. The Cut Depicts the Cut disorientingly splices whomping bass and jittery beats with sweetly spaced-out vocals, aggro rap and distorted slacker indie. Highlight Let the Virgin Drive’s gospel intro prefaces an ingeniously jarring combination of robotically Auto-Tuned croon and country-inflected shoegaze, before giving way to fuzzy spoken-word soundscape and more screaming. There is a thread of true-crime horror – Let the Virgin Drive alludes to a serial killer; Something’s Ending opens with the monstrously whispered line “They pulled another one out of the river”; another track is titled Found a Body.
Generally, however, this record is less choppy and abrasive than its predecessor; a handful of later songs are merely mildly distorted indie rock. The band’s creative leaps now have more time to shine, but even on this more restrained outing, Spirit of the Beehive are still writing tales of the unexpected.