Existential anxiety shimmers through Beach Bunny‘s new record, Tunnel Vision. “You think the world will act the same,” frontperson Lili Trifilio sings on highlight ‘Pixie Cut’, “Your aversion to anything new/ Makes you maladapt to change.” That the world is changing for the worse is a fact she acknowledges right from the album’s opening track, though the band – rounded out by bassist Anthony Vaccaro and drummer Jon Alvarado – conjure enough sticky hooks and buoyant melodies to steer the singer through the ensuing self-sabotage and perpetual uncertainty. While the songs on Tunnel Vision are easy on the ears, they didn’t come easily; Lili Trifilio experienced writer’s block in the early stages of the album, and it was the very act of writing about being stuck in her own head that helped open the floodgates. Her lyrics became more abstract and introspective, but no less relatable or urgently felt. The group – who have today announced the third annual Pool Party Festival in their hometown of Chicago – then recorded the LP in 2024 with longtime producer Sean O’Keefe, getting playful with the basic tenets of their pop-punk sound. “I’d give my brain a pixie cut/ If it’d make the voices all shut up,” Trifilio sings. If yours won’t shut up either, at least they can sing along.
We caught up with Beach Bunny’s Lili Trifilio to talk about the making of Tunnel Vision, playing the new songs live, nostalgia, and more.
How’s your day been so far? It’s noon there, right?
It’s been good. I actually just kinda woke up. We had a Canada show in Toronto yesterday, and we are now in Detroit, but we had to wake up at like 4:30 to cross the border and go through customs and stuff. So we did that, and then I was like, “I’m just gonna sleep in.”
Pool Kids have joined you on these dates, right?
Yeah, they’re awesome.
I interviewed them when they released their self-titled album, and as I went back to remember when that was, I realized it came out the same day that Emotional Creature did.
Oh, really? I didn’t know that. [laughs] I’m gonna bring it up now. I hope they weren’t harboring any grudge there.
These shows must feel like a long time coming for people who keep going back to those records. I know that in terms of recording Tunnel Vision, a big goal was making sure you’d be able to translate these songs live. How has that approach been paying off so far?
I think we were all a little bit nervous to play new songs before they even came out. But luckily, Tunnel Vision in many ways is a rock record and is really guitar-focused, which I think feels like a safe spot for Beach Bunny. So it was really amazing now that it’s out to see the reception beforehand and people getting excited. Now it’s been out for three or four days, and people already know the words and stuff, which is really crazy. Beach Bunny fans are super awesome.
When it came to writing these new songs, you had a bit more downtime to reflect on yourself and the state of the world compared to Emotional Creature. How do you remember the time when songs for Tunnel Vision started flowing out of you?
That’s a great question. I would say that maybe the latter half of 2023, I felt like I was starting to get my groove back. I think I just needed to give myself a break and stop putting so much pressure on writing the music. So about half the record was written, I think, end of 2023, beginning of 2024. We were in the studio and had to take quite a significant break from doing studio things to go on tour, and then the summer was just very busy. During those times, I think being on the road inspired another handful of songs, which then got recorded in October. We picked through the best of all those batches and merged it together. Luckily, everything sounds cohesive.
I read that you wrote ‘Vertigo’ in an airplane and had to focus on making sure it stayed in your mind before you had a chance to demo it. Lyrics aside, do melodies tend to come and go for you, or do you have a process for capturing or organizing them?
In general, in the past, I would need to sit in bed and really figure out the chords. But I think just from doing this for like a decade now, I do get little spurts of inspiration, and I try to save them when it comes up. Whether that’s recording a little something in a voice memo or jotting down some lyrics that I’ll return back to. ‘Vertigo’ was one of the first times where that felt really natural and effortless. In many ways, it felt easy, and I think that was the first time since Emotional Creature that writing a song had felt easy. Once ‘Vertigo’ was unlocked in my brain, it felt like every other song in little moments was really a lot easier to capture.
One thing that adds to the urgency of these songs for me is a kind of nervy quiver in your voice that feels more prominent than on previous albums. Was that something you were conscious of while demoing or recording the songs?
It was probably more like a subconscious choice, honestly. When I was writing Emotional Creature, the influences I was pulling from are a lot of artists and songs that aren’t really in my regular rotation now. That was probably the same for Tunnel Vision, where the music I was listening to at the time had some interesting vocal techniques. You just get inspired by a lot of things and, maybe subconsciously, copy bits and pieces. With this record, I was also very inspired not just by bigger artists, but a lot of friends in my life who were putting out music, and they all have very distinct styles.
Do you mind shouting out some of them?
This band Charly Bliss is super awesome, and I was listening to their old stuff. My friend Hank Heaven, who makes more experimental country kind of stuff. Rafaella, who’s way more in the pop world. This band in Chicago, Football Head, has more pop-punk angles. Everybody was bringing something different to the table, butI think I was just more receptive to music, a little bit prior to and during the Tunnel Vision writing process. Whereas in late 2022, early 2023, after Emotional Creature – I was just in a big depressive episode, and I feel like I really wasn’t listening too much. I was listening to, like, podcasts.
I’m glad you mentioned Charly Bliss, because I think you both address nostalgia in an interesting way on your latest records. While there is a sense of nostalgia in some of the songs on Tunnel Vision, what struck me about ‘Clueless’ is how you question the things that nostalgia makes you believe. You talk about a memory being partial, but do you feel like you have a clearer perspective on that past now in any way?
I think this record in a lot of ways has helped me move through some of these emotions. But yeah, certainly nostalgia is something that affects me and affects my writing, and I think there’s a lot of yearning for simpler times in general on the record. While also being like: five years ago there were problems, ten years ago there were problems. There has not been a perfect time in human history to be a functioning person. There’s always gonna be stuff, whether that’s personal or in the world. I think sometimes it’s easy to romanticize the past until you actually, critically think about, “Well, when I was 19, what was my headspace?” And if I think about it that way, I’m actually really grateful right now to be 28 and feel a lot more confident in myself and feel like I have a better grip on who I am than in the past.
As introspective as some of these songs are, you also contextualize your feelings within the world around you. The two second-to-last songs, ‘Violence’ and ‘Just Around the Corner’, find you turning your gaze outward more. What was the thinking behind placing them together and towards the end of the record?
I think in a loose way, certainly sonically, we were also thinking about the tracks and how they would flow into each other. But from a more thematic perspective, because the record does focus a lot on my relationship with myself and mental health, it was important to me to recognize that nobody’s feeling things in a void. If you’re feeling anxiety or seeking control or feeling indecisive – a lot of these things I sing about on the record – it can expand to other things. Where is this anxiety or lack of control coming from? And I think in many ways, I reached at least a partial conclusion just from being in America and seeing all my friends and loved ones around me struggling, that part of the responsibility is also on what’s going on around you, and you can only control so much.
You released the closing track, ‘Cycles’, under your own name in 2019 as a single, but it gets at a lot of the same theme that pervade this record. What did it mean for you not just to revisit it as Beach Bunny, to place it alongside these songs and end the record with it?
I’m just so grateful that that song wasn’t tied to any prior contracts or anything. When I made it back in 2019, I was just stating my mind and not really caring too much about public perception. It was actually one of the first songs we recorded on this album, before it even developed into an album. I was like, “I really love this song. It would be awesome to have it full band so we could play it live one day and really give it what it needs.” The original is very demo-y, so I’m sure recording that with the band led to other songs on the record. Knowing that I could write a song about something maybe a little bit deeper or more abstract too, because a lot of Beach Bunny’s discography is romance and breakup songs, “me and another person.” I think ‘Cycles’ kind of opened my eyes to being like, “I could actually sing about anything. I could just sing about this quarter-life crisis I’m having and about how the state of the world is giving me anxiety, and maybe people will actually like that.” [laughs]
You also allow yourself to lean on the uncertainty as opposed to trying to force answers to this quarter-life crisis. But there is this one line on ‘Chasm’: “Presence is the essence of what I’ll become.” How do you make yourself work toward that ideal?
That’s a really good question. In the last couple years, I’ve gone on and off waves of meditation and leaning into mindfulness practices, which doesn’t always work. But I think what the record does – and what’s something I’m realizing in my own personal life I need to do more – is just talk about it and lean on community. I think a lot of those worries that people feel in their late twenties are, I’m realizing, very universal and relatable. If you can talk to someone experiencing the same thing as you, you might realize that you’re not alone, and it’s gonna be okay.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and length.
Beach Bunny’s Tunnel Vision is out now.
