Indie-pop band “Beach Bunny” released their third album “Tunnel Vision” on April 24, marking a level of growth for the group as their music transitions from hopeless love songs to life as an adult and the human condition.
The band, led by Chicago-raised Lilli Trifilio, began releasing music back in 2016 but blew up in virality following their album “Honeymoon” in 2020. The album, featuring the viral song “Cloud 9,” dealt heavily with themes of teenage angst, heartbreak and romance. Their sophomore album, “Emotional Creature,” released in 2022, continued dealing with themes of romantic entanglements, both positively and negatively.
But with their junior album, Trifilio and the band decided to veer away from their pigeonhole of romance.
“It’s really just a dialogue with myself, and then reflecting on the world, a little,” Trifilio said in an interview with Rolling Stone. “It was nice to break out of that and conquer some new topics.”
“Tunnel Vision” indeed accomplishes Trifilio’s mission of breaking out of the band’s usual themes. The album, which consists of 10 tracks and is 29 minutes long, barely broaches the typical juvenile themes Trifilio previously concerned herself with. Instead, the album fixates on change: change in life, in circumstance, in mindset.
The opening song, “Mr. Predictable,” has Trifilio critiquing an imaginary person for wanting the world to remain static. The rest of the album tackles this opening theme of change and interprets it in different ways. The tracks “Chasm” and “Tunnel Vision” are about the hardships of coping with change and how one struggles with carving their path. The song is rather interpersonal and focuses on self-perception, while the subsequent track “Clueless” deals with changes in the relationships between Trifilio and the people around her as they live their lives.
“Clueless” is my favorite track on the album. It takes what Trifilio has experience in, singing about relationships and their difficulties, but revokes the romantic overtones that have become typical with Beach Bunny. Instead, the track focuses on the nostalgic overlook of the past as everything changes and people leave Trifilio’s life due to their own circumstances, such as a close friend moving away. This track hits particularly close to me as a senior in high school, prepared to abdicate the safety of home for college and watching all my peers do the same.
Afterwards, the album spends the second half as a musical self-examination. “Pixie Cut” and “Vertigo” both deal with themes of mental spirals and troubling thoughts. A level of anxiety permeates both songs as Trifilio wishes for her mind to quiet, accented by the repetitive beats and lower singing pitch. The two tracks are a remarkable return to Trifilio’s typical themes of teenage angst – but the last three songs on the album truly breathe something remarkable into the album, showcasing Trifilio departing from both the typical themes of her music, but also the sound of Beach Bunny. Typically, the fun pop-based percussions and beats accompany heart-twirling lyrics painting the teenage condition.
However, the final three songs – “Violence,” “Just Around the Corner” and “Cycles” – take a notably darker tone. Trifilio’s singing takes a lower tone, almost melancholic, while the music encompassing her words is lower. The “fun” sound of pop is made to sound different, repeated beats now acting almost claustrophobic as the lyrics depict the struggles of living amid the disasters, violence and hardship of the current century. The nosedive into such a grim conclusion initially shocked me. I had expected this album to be about the typical “growing up” aspect of relationships, just a more mature, less romance-obsessed album that would inch slightly into new grounds, without truly breaking them.
“The government doesn’t care who dies / But they’ll give you the world on a silver platter / A table, they set for two / It’s America, baby, what’s the matter?” Trifilio sings in the song “Just Around the Corner.”
I could not have been more wrong. Beach Bunny’s soulful lyrics take “growing up” to mean more than the archetypal ways of perceiving aging. The lyrics grow from teenage angst and romance into a true, mature understanding of the world around the singer and their audience. The hardships, difficulties and level of impossibility that oppress one’s mental state in this destructive century. I absolutely adored the final third of this album and thought it a remarkable break for the band. I cannot wait to see Trifilio continuing to grow in this direction and further away from the youthful notions of love.
