Beach Bunny Are Thinking About the Long Game

All Lili Trifilio needed was a little time off. By the time Beach Bunny’s lead singer and songwriter found herself back home in Chicago in the second half of 2023, she realized she’d been touring nonstop for the past five or so years. There was so much to process, so much to unwind from: The band’s unlikely viral fame that came before they released a single full-length album, an intense and somewhat alienating brush with success and the music industry, the stresses of touring during the ongoing pandemic (and getting sick while doing so). 

Trifilio, 28, describes her time back home in Chicago as a period of recalibration. She consumed art, reconnected with friends and family, and reintegrated into the Chicago music scene she grew up in. 

Ironically, or perhaps not surprisingly, the only sustained period of down time Trifilio had since starting Beach Bunny ended up proving foundational to Tunnel Vision, the band’s forthcoming third album, due on April 25.

“I was just experiencing life,” says Trifilio, “and so many of those feelings is what made it into the record: self-doubt, uncertainty dealing with the aftermath of the pandemic and the world. I think all those feelings really shined on this record.”

Trifilio describes Tunnel Vision as a back-to-basics rock record. The album merges the huge guitar riffs of their 2020 debut, Honeymoon, with the layered and more expensively produced textures from 2022’s Emotional Creature. “We really love making a big-punch chorus,” Trifilio says, in something of an understatement, as she describes the soaring hooks, crisp guitars, and earworm melodies that populate tracks like “Mr Predictable,” “Tunnel Vision,” and “Clueless.”

Unlike much of their work to date, Tunnel Vision steers almost entirely clear of romantic entanglements and heartbreak as subject matter. Instead, Trifilio focused both inward, writing reflective songs about mental health and anxiety over aging as she hit her late twenties, and outward, setting her huge choruses to socially-minded songs about the climate crisis and dystopia on songs like “Violence” and “Just Around the Corner.” 

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“Microplastics in our clothing,” she sings in the former. “Waterways are slowly going/Everything is decomposing.”

For Trifilio, Beach Bunny’s breakthrough with songs about teenage romantic angst (like their early hit “Cloud 9”) made sense for where she was at that time; now, she’s in a different place. “It’s really just a dialogue with myself, and then reflecting on the world, a little,” she says. “It was nice to break out of that and conquer some new topics.”

Many of the band’s most exciting moments in the studio for this album came out of collaboration between Trifilio and her bandmates, guitarist Anthony Vaccaro and drummer Jon Alvarado. When Trifilio realized her hummed voice note could become the signature post-chorus riff on the title track, she relied on Vaccaro to translate it into an actual guitar part.

Trifilio describes the process of writing and recording Tunnel Vision as organic, a refreshing reset from what she says was a stressful and not altogether pleasant experience of rushing out the band’s second album, Emotional Creature, for their former label, Mom + Pop, following the success of Honeymoon. 

“I was feeling pressure, less from fans, and more from the music industry I was surrounded with at the time,” she says. “Looking back, I’m proud of what we did. We did the best we could given the circumstances. But touring when half of us got Covid and we had to cancel a bunch of shows, that was regrettable. Putting out an album without a lot of time to reflect … I think it was about striking while the iron was hot, instead of making something that felt ready. With this new album, everything feels like it happened in the way it was meant to happen. We don’t have to take any shortcuts. The art is more important than the delivery time.”

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Trifilio has led her band for nearly a decade, navigating the group through the pitfalls and allures of scoring a TikTok hit early in their career. “I wasn’t expecting all of this to happen when I started,” she says. “Music was more just a hobby that turned into a passion that’s now a career.”

She’s well aware of the requirements of being a rock band in the 2020s, and she balances, as best she can, the need to keep the internet supplied with fresh content and her desire to make thoughtful records that position Beach Bunny for a long career. In conversation, she’ll talk about how a track has “performed” and make references to “short-form content” with a matter-of-factness, unafraid to show that being versed in social strategy and analytics is simply part of the job. Still, she’d love to detach from this part of the job, if she could.

“I wish I could say I didn’t think about it and it didn’t bother me,” she says. “I’m still navigating how to make time away from social media but still be active.” She mentions that she’s trying to compare herself to her own past work, rather than to other artists. “But it’s hard, if I’m being completely honest.”

That kind of anxiety about how one is being perceived in relation to others is another subject Trifilio sings about on her new record. “Perfection is expected,” she sings on “Pixie Cut,” another three-minute pop sugar rush that masks some of Trifilio’s darkest and deepest writing. “The prisoner of your own brain.”

“The record talks a lot about mental health and the darkness in the world,” the songwriter says. “But we’re all in this together.”