Amdi’s Album of the Year: You’ll Have To Lose Something, and It Won’t Be Your Daily Rot

What’s up yall. I told you already that I had an article coming out about SPIRIT OF THE BEEHIVE written by my homie Amdi. Well here it is.

ffo: collage & deconstructivist rock, indie rock, neo-psych, emo

If you know me, you know I obsess over anything Spirit of the Beehive and its members do. What they create, in my opinion, is nothing short of genius, and there is so, so much to sink your teeth into with their release from this year. 

Between songs that meander and wind around several ideas that manage to weave dissonant noise together with beautifully nostalgic pop sensibility, they have a way of sounding like they exist in a vacuum of time, not just straddling vintage and modern, but completely dissolving the notion that the two exist in separate areas at all. The sound of the band is one of the only that I feel truly indicates something that truly transcends time itself. With that, this was an album I more or less anticipated would be my favorite of the year, but I don’t think I saw it becoming an all time favorite of mine. The lead singles, Let the Virgin Drive and Somethings Ending/I’ve Been Evil, were both wonderful but didn’t necessarily sell me on this project stacking up to outperform the highs of their two previous LP’s, Entertainment, Death and Hypnic Jerks. What I got, however, was an album that felt like the most refined culmination of Spirit’s career imaginable. The jarring futurism of the electronics and sample chopping of Entertainment, Death rears its head plenty between the subtly dizzying odd tempos and Beach Boys/Beatles hooks that danced across Hypnic Jerks before warping across different scenes of collages that have been around since the band dropped Pleasure Suck in 2017. Even some moments, namely the end of The Cut Depicts the Cut, call back to the roomy production sounds and almost slacker tinged songwriting of the latter of the mentioned albums. Instead of breakneck transitions and lofi-leaning production, two elements featured on ED and HJ that I love in their respective scopes, You’ll Have to Lose Something features a very polished production sound that manages to sacrifice no amount of character nor texture alongside transitions between movements that are often so subtle you won’t even realize songs are completely flipping on their own heads until after a few listens. 

On top of the grandiose production and intricate song structures, Spirit continues to write absolutely beautiful melodies that touch on no shortage of genres and styles spanning over the past five to six decades. The Disruption begins with a verse that feels hypermodern, leading in with a stuttering chopped vocal sample that follows with a very coolheaded sense of melancholy. From here, the band breaks into an explosive grungy, stonery, emo break that feels like some of the most anthemic ten to fifteen seconds on the record with Zack and Corey harmonizing the line “we all spat in the tunnels.” The song then features a quick, sparse verse from MSPAINT frontman DeeDee and dives back into a second emo/stoner break with guitars that call to a certain Mr. West’s finest hours before going down the bigoted hatred path he’s been on for the past half decade. The lead single, Let the Virgin Drive, runs a masterclass in pop melody with no creative holds barred as the band writes a 60s pop song with grunge breaks, autotuned city pop samples, and bridges that feel like traversing the notorious pitch black five and a half minute hallway from House of Leaves (a book whose atmosphere and uncanny nature I strongly feel Spirit of the Beehive matches in their music). I can’t think of any other band that does anything remotely similar to this, and if you can, please contact me and give me your recommendations.

Going back to the subject of vocal harmonies, this record has them in spades. There isn’t a single song on this album that misses an opportunity for any combination of the three vocalists to stack their voices, creating some stunningly beautiful harmonies. Moments where these shine the most for me were the subtly layered vocals with harmonies reminiscent of 90s indie during the first few verses of Sorry Pore Injector, the Beatlesesque harmonizing between Corey and Zack on the second half of I’ve Been Evil, and most notably, the stunning buildup of stacked vocals throughout 1/500, a song which may have been the most beautiful two and a half minutes of the record. Weaving between the most subtle use of 7/8 and standard time creates a heady atmosphere while the band evoke the strongest sense of yearning imaginable reflecting on a decade’s love lost. The way this song dynamically moves never allows it to lose its viscerality, and its brevity only helps it pack an even stronger punch as the band paints an immaculate image of heartache.

Alongside the stunning vocals were instrumentals that struck me quickly up front, but continued to inspire further awe as I digested the album with near daily listens after its release. Yes, I am okay—this project really burrowed its way deep into my heart more quickly than anything I’ve heard this year, possibly the most out of anything I have listened to since really notably getting into music. There’s a real magic to what this band makes after beginning to digest and feel their body of work. Up front, I was in awe of how fantastic all the instruments sounded and how well-balanced they were in the mix while still maintaining a strong creative edge to the respective sounds of each instrument and sample that the band recorded and chopped. The guitar sounds the band achieved all sounded novel and original within their respective contexts; Spirit is not a band that strolls along known paths like many contemporary acts do. You won’t find any reverb into fuzz into more reverb combos that oversaturate today’s indie scenes as the sound of shoegaze becomes in vogue whilst its spirit is eschewed, nor will you find the same Gibson/Fender flagship guitar plugged into a Marshall stack that seems to plague 90% of all rock records made from 1970 forward. Instead, there are dense guitar textures that are difficult to discern, and modulation that doesn’t sound quite like anything familiar at a first listen (or a second listen, let's be real here). Perhaps the most guitar driven song, Duplicate Spotted, jumps into a massive grunge tinged hook after building up to it with a spacious intro and absolutely lovely bridge that quiets down to allow the aforementioned hook to explode with its fuzzy guitars and portamento synths. Weaving around the instruments often are vocals that can sometimes sound completely alien while maintaining a very human evocativeness through keeping a high level of sheen on their mixing. Highlights for me include Rivka’s very heavily filtered passages, notably on The Cut Depicts the Cut and Found a Body. What really takes the cake, for me, were the creative production and sound design decisions taken with the drums and the synths. Drum sounds vary so widely across the album, and more often than not, across songs, morphing from skittery electronic drum sequences worthy of inducing secondhand paranoia to roomy drums that sound so uncanny I would’ve believed they were sampled. The standard live drums on this album also sound fantastic and manage to match the vibe of any song put forward on the album. Drums are not often one of the first instruments I would list as conveying emotion, but the way they are performed, sequenced, sampled, and mixed on this album made them an integral part of the music’s atmosphere. Had they been performed any other way, this music would have lost so much of what makes it shine. Just as important were the synth sounds, which arguably helped set the tone of every song more than any other instrument, as there is seldom a moment in which they are absent. Between harsh, buzzy basslines, fluttery pads, and leads nostalgic of the peak moments of 2010’s indie and synth pop movements, the synths serve as vehicles for the music to contain unique atmospheres and make their left turns as subtly as they do. Every song on this album features some degree of synthesis, and the electronic elements imposed by the synths are a cornerstone in the general vibe of each song, so it is very difficult to pick a few key moments in which the band’s prowess with these is best highlighted. That being said, the songs best defined by their electronic elements would probably have to be The Cut Depicts the Cut, Found a Body, and Sun Swept the Evening Red. Each song leans heavily into their electronic elements to bend genres in a way that feels like the ideal future of rock music has been reeled into today’s world.

Expanding on the electronic elements, what rattles me the most in this album, and will likely keep me up at night thinking and wondering how their implementation was possible, were all the string samples throughout this album. According to the band, every string sample was recorded by Zack on his iPhone while attending a friend’s wedding in which a string quartet played. How? How does one begin to tackle writing songs around these types of samples? How do you make iPhone voice memo recordings of instruments from a wedding sound remotely good to begin with? How is it possible to make these fit so seamlessly into your band’s music? I don’t know the answers to these questions, and likely never will. All I can do is acknowledge the genius of them and the unfathomable amount of work it likely took to make them work as well as they do, because they are such an integral piece to the sound of the album, and elevated the experience of listening to it tenfold. Hell, the closing piece of the album, Earth Kit, revolves around said string samples for the better half of its runtime, and their use makes for one of the best (if not the best) endings to an album this year. We are truly blessed to live in a day where there are bands doing things as creative as this.

On top of all the awe inspiring sonics offered on You’ll Have to Lose Something, Spirit of the Beehive also bring haunting and crushing lyrics to each song. Going between themes of cinematic horror, the anxieties of living in the modern hellscape that is today’s world, and a breakup between members Rivka and Zack, there is a lot to unpack and much to be felt. Out of everything offered in the album, the songs whose lyrics have tied me in the most are the deeply reflective, borderline emo passages in 1/500, Found a Body, Sorry Pore Injector, Earth Kit, and Sun Swept the Evening Red. The pinnacle lines that have never ceased to deliver their viscerality to my heart both lie within 1/500, in which “Put me in the back, put me back in the corner of your mind,” followed by “Another night on the phone/Another year spent with the television/It’s just a mirror, and it's looking back at me, our old house, faulty light switch/I check it/It’s off, It’s off, It’s off,” detailing some of the most relatable sentiments felt in going through breakups and yearning for a love lost. The two uses of televisions as imagery, both in this song and in Sorry Pore Injector with “face keeps changing, channel surfing past the immovable beast; the daily rot,” feel very poignant in the strong sense of paralysis that comes with facing the task of navigating through the current day and age. Particularly, with the availability of any screen offering cheap and mindless entertainment that allows you to temporarily sidestep the weight of responsibility needed to tackle the immovable beast/daily rot of inaction, this feels widely relatable for the average listener. And when that screen becomes a mirror that stares back at you from the void, knowing what your walls have seen, and you ultimately are forced to reflect on what you’ve become over time, these two segments across their respective songs feel very connected and create a strong motif that offers a somewhat morose narrative to the album that I really hold dear.

To wrap things up, I still find it incredible how this album feels like everything I love in music managed to get put together in a single package without doing any of it in a manner that feels forced, trite, or on the nose. You’ll Have to Lose Something feels like the ultimate culmination of what Spirit of the Beehive has done thus far, and more. No album feels simultaneously as nostalgic and ahead of its time as this one does, and I genuinely believe that this is going to be an all time favorite of mine, at least until the likely outcome arrives in which the band follows it with something even better. I wrote right around three pages of text gushing over this and still don’t feel that my words can convey a fraction of what this album makes me feel—it needs to be experienced to be understood. I would strongly urge anyone to go listen to this a few times; just once or twice seriously won’t do it justice. If you happen to like it, I would definitely check out Spirit’s work leading up to this. The band truly only seems to grow more and more with each release. If you made it this far, thanks for sticking through a very loosely structured, mostly flow of conscious article in which I literally just gushed over this album.

Written by Andrew Leavitt