SPIRIT OF THE BEEHIVE Excel at the Art of Volatile Mercurialness on YOU’LL HAVE TO LOSE SOMETHING

The Philadelphia trio’s latest album manages to somehow maintain the unpredictability and eerie discomfort of their earlier work while forgoing much of the confrontational tone, making each instance of whiplash feel less like a fist to the face than an idle turn of a radio dial.

By Casey Epstein-Gross | August 27, 2024 | 9:00am

Music Reviews Spirit of the Beehive

SPIRIT OF THE BEEHIVE Excel at the Art of Volatile Mercurialness on YOU’LL HAVE TO LOSE SOMETHING

There’s an absurdist theater company in New York called the Neofuturists who I’ve grown quite fond of. They’re best known, perhaps, for The Infinite Wrench, a weekly show they put on with a very specific gimmick: They (attempt to) perform 30 plays in 60 minutes. Audience members call out numbers between 1-30, and whichever number the cast members hear first is the play they begin with—and when it rapidly ends just a minute or two later, the process repeats. This goes on until all plays have been shown or, more likely, the timer is up. The plays themselves, which are all written by the cast, vary from bizarre slapstick to political satire to heartrendingly personal stories of despair. It is a whirlwind experience, the whiplash of it unlike anything else I can name. That is, barring one key exception: a SPIRIT OF THE BEEHIVE album.

The way I pitch SPIRIT OF THE BEEHIVE to my more skeptical friends is remarkably similar to the speech the Neofuturists give the audience at the top of the hour: Hate whatever’s going on? Luckily for you, it’s almost over; the next thing is imminent. Love whatever’s going on? Well, savor it, because it is going to morph into an entirely different beast within the minute.

SPIRIT OF THE BEEHIVE have long excelled at the art of volatile mercurialness, leaping between genres like Jake from Subway Surfers leaps atop train cars. Enjoy a riff? Cling to it, because it’s about to be suddenly swallowed by syncopated static. Hate a song’s foray into rap-rock? Don’t you worry, it’ll shift into electro-pop-injected shoegaze in 10 seconds. SPIRIT’s songs are less “songs” in the classical sense than they are collages—amalgamations of melodies and noises strung together in inscrutable yet utterly intentional ways.

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But these choices have, perhaps, never felt more intentional than in their latest release, YOU’LL HAVE TO LOSE SOMETHING, which debuted this past Friday. Every 30 seconds that pass in the record, something new is lost: a rhythm, a melody, an orchestra, a voice. The moment you grow accustomed to a song, it slips away from your grasp, as if to tease you for the audacity of thinking it could ever remain yours. On their fifth album, SPIRIT OF THE BEEHIVE make tangible the ineffable devastation of trying to sate a hunger that slides away the moment it is likely to be met by grieving that loss in the same breath—as it self-flagellates for having the gall to grieve at all.

YOU’LL HAVE TO LOSE SOMETHING is an unerringly mature breakup album, and I cannot believe it exists. Most bands—most friend groups—would not survive the recent turmoil the trio behind SPIRIT OF THE BEEHIVE has withstood: the Philadelphia group’s heart has always been the decade-long relationship between Zack Schwartz and Rivka Ravede, which more or less spans the band’s own existence, with the excellent Corey Wichlin rounding out the group. But two years ago, after the release of their grizzled, misanthropic fourth album, ENTERTAINMENT, DEATH, Schwartz and Ravede separated, and for a time, that seemed like that would be it for SPIRIT OF THE BEEHIVE. How could it not be? Ravede moved to Portugal while Schwartz and Wichlin remained in Pennsylvania, splitting up the trio known for their Philly DIY roots. In 2023, the band reconvened and released the phenomenal i’m so lucky—an EP which felt less like an EP than a hard press into an open wound, and as much as I loved it, the empath in me worried it couldn’t possibly be sustainable. I have never been so happy to be wrong.

As far as breakup records go, YOU’LL HAVE TO LOSE SOMETHING is undeniably unconventional: while it’s certainly expected for a band’s sound to take a turn following a devastating breakup, SPIRIT OF THE BEEHIVE’s latest manages to take the road less traveled. Rather than letting a romantic tragedy urge them further into that cavernous sharp-toothed maw of blackened rage, the catalyst for a record more grisly than ever before, the tangible shift found across YOU’LL HAVE TO LOSE SOMETHING—because there is a tangible shift, especially in comparison to the gnarly, impenetrable ENTERTAINMENT, DEATH—is in the complete opposite direction. YOU’LL HAVE TO LOSE SOMETHING’s edges are softer, easier to touch; as Wichlin puts it, the band “wanted to make something intentionally less antagonistic.” Hearing this initially set some long-time listeners ill-at-ease: what is a SPIRIT OF THE BEEHIVE album without that antagonism, absent of all those “hard left turns”? Actually hearing the record, however, makes those concerns dissipate.

The official album description’s claim that YOU’LL HAVE TO LOSE SOMETHING has “fewer drastic arrangement changes” than previous records is not untrue, per se, but it may conjure up the wrong idea. The change is less in form than in tone, in presentation: the distance between the genres that the songs leap does not decrease, nor do the number of leaps themselves. It’s the difference, rather, between a jump-scare and a channel-hop. YOU’LL HAVE TO LOSE SOMETHING manages to somehow maintain the unpredictability and eerie discomfort of the gleeful whiplash of SPIRIT’s earlier work while forgoing much of the confrontational tone—making each instance of whiplash feel less like a fist to the face than an idle turn of a radio dial. It’s still arthouse horror, but less Videodrome than, say, Dogtooth. It’s not flashy, in-your-face scares; it’s a haunting kind of horror, the chilling specter of grief ever-present and always ominous. It’s flipping through channels while alone in a newly empty house as the shadows grow longer by the minute. And it works; this grainy mundanity grounds the record, providing a surprisingly crucial foundation for the soundscapes SPIRIT OF THE BEEHIVE have always been so accomplished at creating.

The album begins, fittingly, with an echo of an echo. The first track, “THE DISRUPTION,” starts and ends with the same line: “A shot rings out; it bellows.” The song braids itself together as it unbraids itself apart, a stitch eternally in-process but made with limited string. Waves of noise interweave with gauzy synth and breakbeat drums. Warped drones from Schwartz fade out as a feature from MSPAINT breaks in, chanting a declaration of healing like a mantra, before being suddenly swallowed by a muted scream that grows in intensity alongside the abrasive wall of sound behind it—and then stops, replaced by smooth electro-indie hums.

(It is a moment that, for me, feels like one of the album’s rare missteps: the head-banging calls for growth make for a strange marriage between Show Me The Body and Sage Francis—and, if I want to be really crude, a little bit of twenty one pilots, but perhaps that feels too mean—causing it to end up landing somewhere just beyond catharsis, teetering into melodrama. There are multiple beats throughout the record that awkwardly wobble over that chasm, but again, like The Infinite Wrench, the great thing about SPIRIT OF THE BEEHIVE is that every stumble will be immediately superseded by something new. The downside, of course, being that every masterpiece will, too. But these moments were never ours to cling to in the first place—who are we, anyways, to celebrate or grieve their inevitable loss?)

While the entire record is strong, its first half feels especially so. The brassy swing of “STRANGER ALIVE” makes even lines like “I last heard something like a blight in the head” sound upbeat, the tenor of it vaguely reminiscent of early King Krule. The twang is then cut short in favor of sliding into pure indie-pop, with Ravede’s clear, plaintive voice carrying the one-two punch of “I know anxious women with no mouth to spit in / Devotion is a cancer.” Her range becomes self-evident with the next track, “THE CUT DEPICTS THE CUT,” which depicts mundanity in all its eldritch horror. The clarity of Ravede’s voice on “STRANGER ALIVE” is now distorted into something hushed and dissonant as she intones, eerily monotone, that “Hunger makes a menace of us all.”

The waves of static and frenetic percussion interrupt her all the while, until a new drumline kicks in and suddenly we’re in post-hardcore territory, all sludge metal (à la Show Me The Body) as Schwartz half-yells out the song’s title—until it shifts once more, like it found a backdoor into a Tame Impala song, and we find ourselves in a trippy slacker-rock track. All the shifts—and the ease of them, the absence of the shock factor more present in their earlier albums—result in an utterly idiosyncratic listening experience. The best way I can describe it is that it makes you feel like you are an alien descended to Earth who is inexplicably stuck in an old 1950s Morris Oxford with a radio that only half-works and there is nothing you can do but attempt to understand humanity by flipping through its grainy stations. It’s lovely.

Rounding out what is perhaps the strongest three-track-run on the album is “LET THE VIRGIN DRIVE,” the first single released for the record and an undeniable standout. “Heaven is a lie,” Schwartz croons after a brief gospel intro, “‘Cause you are earthly and you’re alive / When I watch you from afar from the window in my car.” Beginning as an unconventional, one-sided duet between Schwartz and a vocoder-altered sample from Japanese pop icon Tatsuro Yamashita, the song dives into campy nostalgia. It’s an easy-listening pop anthem that disguises its darker impulses in its own candy coating as it starts to gradually dissolve in real time, like spun sugar dipped in water.

Something in “LET THE VIRGIN DRIVE” feels off for its entirety, but by the time Ravede cuts in for a quiet, discomforting interlude, the song already feels like it’s mid-melt: “The girls are in the basement,” she sings, understated. “It’s on the television / Nobody could believe it.” Schwartz returns, but this time for a rhythmic, chilling murmur: “Cold in a T-shirt / Rain is falling / No one needs to know.” There’s a scream in the background: “Help, somebody help me.” A wall of sound drowns out everything else, before slowly and unexpectedly building back into the track’s original cheery melody, which now feels deeply unsettling. It’s a remarkably well-constructed song, allowing it to allude to a narrative never explained yet viscerally felt. Like nearly every other component of YOU’LL HAVE TO LOSE SOMETHING, this track yearns, and bleeds with it—bleeds for it. “It’s about unrequited love and making up a situation or whole life in your head,” says Schwartz. “The other person finally ‘sees you’ and your ‘problems are solved,’ but they aren’t, really.”

YOU’LL HAVE TO LOSE SOMETHING is a title that sounds like prophecy but, in truth, is an acceptance of fate rather than a prediction of it. Few of the album’s tracks catalog the process of leaving or being left; it is all about learning to live in the aftermath. Even in “SOMETHING’S ENDING,” it sounds like the “something” has already ended, the present tense little more than a cruel pretense masking the truth already known: “You know what you need,” voices coo over harsh blocks of noise, “You’ve always known / Stop pretending.” What else can you expect from a song that begins with the finding of a corpse? (“They pulled another one out of the river,” Schwartz, in a very Jamie Stewart-like warble, half-whispers as strikes of dissonance overtake the background instrumentals: “It looked like you.”)

There is no song, however, that feels like it encompasses the thematic drive of this album quite like “I’VE BEEN EVIL,” another highlight (and single), as well as a personal favorite. The track does a sonic lap around the landscape of indie, its sound winding through Stephen Malkmus, Good Morning, Alex G, Animal Collective and more. But as genuinely catchy as the song is (it’s been an earworm for me for weeks now), it’s the lyricism that truly sets it apart—capturing small moments of mid-grief mundane violence like fireflies in a jar, then shaking them to see the glow. “I’ve been evil ever since you left,” the song begins. Then: Time passes. Your friend brings a gun to work (you don’t know if they consider you a friend). Your thumb can’t seem to leave your bruise alone (you are not tweezing out the splinter buried deep). You count human interaction by the indents left on floorboards (you sweep it all under rugs you didn’t know you had). You can’t stop mourning that which was never yours (in order to lose something you have to have had it to begin with).

YOU’LL HAVE TO LOSE SOMETHING is strongest in these moments: the breaths between one loss and the next, the small mundanities of life after loss, distance made intimate and intimacy made distant. There are times, however, where the album reaches for grandiosity—reaches for catharsis (like the rap-rock portion of “THE DISRUPTION”), for transcendence (like the broad orchestral sweeps resonating on “EARTH KIT,” the record’s closing track). And while they don’t fail, per se, they fall short of reaching whatever grandiosity is aimed for, and instead feel a little out of place in an album so focused on immanence. But I can’t fault SPIRIT OF THE BEEHIVE for attempting to actualize that burning yearn echoed throughout the record; it’s only natural. That’s the raw truth the album hits on, the open sore it can’t stop pressing: Hunger makes a menace of us all.