Sleigh Bells Recalibrate on the Bouncy Bunky Becky Birthday Boy
After a series of disappointing, overwrought releases, the Brooklyn noise-pop duo’s sixth album is a nimble late-career return to form that enlivens their signature loudness with a renewed sense of spirit.
When Sleigh Bells broke out in 2010 with their masterful, electrifying debut Treats, it signaled a promising start to their career, especially as it arrived at a fruitful time in the indie scene. The Brooklyn noise-pop duo stood out for their brash production style and exhilarating hooks, cranking up the volume into overdrive, blowing off steam through towering guitar shreds and raucous electronic beats, and counteracting all of that with Alexis Krauss’ delicate, calm-in-the-storm vocals. Songs like “Crown on the Ground,” “Rill Rill,” “Riot Rhythm,” and “Infinity Guitars” were invigorating and surprising, massive but never suffocating, aggressive but never dour. Even 15 years later, Treats still sounds so fresh and effortless, a fertile indie-pop groundwork that other boundary-pushing artists have played off of (and allegedly infringed upon in one particularly notorious case).
But as Sleigh Bells attempted to keep their professional and musical momentum up, their successive outputs left much to be desired. The band’s last few efforts—2013’s Bitter Rivals, 2016’s Jessica Rabbit, 2017’s Kid Kruschev, and 2021’s Texis—lacked the cohesion, compactness, and overall fun of Treats and its underrated follow-up Reign of Terror, simultaneously over-engineered in approach and tedious in execution. Given how their once-singular sound has now become a dominant one with the emergence of hyperpop, recapturing the thrilling heights of their earlier albums seems increasingly less likely. However, their latest work Bunky Becky Birthday Boy proves Krauss and guitarist Derek E. Miller still have some juice left in them and aren’t completely past their prime.
Where their previous records felt strained, scattered, and sluggish, Bunky Becky is a light, tight 11 tracks—a return to form in the sense of being more a clearing of the throat than a major comeback, a relieved exhale more than a breath of fresh air. That’s still a win though, and you can even feel Krauss and Miller are genuinely excited by the music they’re making right now. The endearingly goofy alliterative title speaks to this refreshed, almost carefree attitude, combining the nickname for Krauss’ dog, who passed away in December 2023, with a celebratory reference to the birth of Krauss’s son. Perhaps it’s this personal undercurrent and reconciliation between grief and joy that gives Bunky Becky its compelling emotional thrust and sonic accessibility, in addition to cleaning out the excess that bogged down their prior projects.