70 THENEWYORKER,MARCH2, 2020
The band ’s music is shrewdly tailored to the whims of the social Internet.
POP MUSIC
CLIP ART
The TikTok-ready sounds of Beach Bunny.
BY CARRIE B AT TA N
ILLUSTRATION BY SIOBHÁN GALLAGHER
O
n the video-sharing platform Tik-
Tok, there are nearly seventy-four
million posts hashtagged #promqueen.
Hundreds of thousands of these are set to
a track of the same name, from 2018, by a
young indie-rock band from Chicago called
Beach Bunny. TikTok, which encourages
users to post short, surrealist interpreta-
tions of memes and dance moves, has be-
come an incubator of musical talent, or at
least of persona and digital acumen. Ear-
lier this year, it helped send the rapper
Roddy Ricch’s song “The Box”—which
features a curious squeaking sound, per-
fect for TikTok—to the top of the Bill-
board charts. But, unlike the idiosyncratic
hip-hop that typically takes hold on the
platform, “Prom Queen” is a doleful bal-
lad. The song dramatizes teen-age self-
doubt and has the inverse effect of a pep
talk. “Shut up, count your calories,” Beach
Bunny’s front woman, a twenty-three-year-
old recent college graduate named Lili
Trifilio, sings in a disaffected tone. “I never
looked good in mom jeans.” TikTok users,
most of whom are in their teens or early
twenties, have used the song as a backdrop
for videos both literal and abstract. In one,
a young woman presents an array of prom
dresses, prompting her followers to help
her decide which to buy. In another, some-
one splices together short clips of the food
she’s eaten that day—quite literally count-
ing her calories. One user attempts to fol-
low a Bob Ross painting tutorial; another
tries to cover up his face tattoos with
makeup, sporting a sly grin.
Of all the confessional, female-fronted
indie-rock bands to flourish in the past
decade, Beach Bunny is perhaps the
most shrewdly tailored to the whims of
the social Internet, where everything,
especially the misery and humiliation
of youth, is molded into a bite-size piece
of comic relief. On “Painkiller,” a song
from Beach Bunny’s 2018 EP, also called
“Prom Queen,” Trifilio name-checks
pharmaceuticals that might make her
feel better: “I need paracetamol, trama-
dol, ketamine.... Fill me up with Ty-
lenol, tramadol, ketamine.” It sounds
like it could be from the soundtrack of
“Euphoria,” HBO’s breakout show about
teen-age dereliction. Trifilio is a potent
lyricist who tends toward despondency,
but her songs are deceptively snack-
able—each is a two-minute burst of
honey-butter melody, often with a title
that incorporates hashtag-worthy slang.
Yet, despite Beach Bunny’s pink bub-
ble wrapping, the band’s début album,
“Honeymoon,” which came out this
month, outlines the silhouettes of despair
and longing with an unusually refined
emotional nuance. “Honeymoon” follows
a relationship in its turbulent early stages.
“Maybe we are getting too close,” Trifilio
sings on a song called “Cuffing Season.”
The title comes from a term for the cou-
pling up that occurs during the winter
months—a cloying reference that masks
the song’s subtle exploration of roman-
tic uncertainty. “Sometimes I like being
on my own/I’m afraid of winding up
alone/But that’s not love,” Trifilio sings.
Unlike many in her cohort, who favor
lyrical complexity, Trifilio is exaggerat-
edly plainspoken. The strongest song on
the album is “Rearview,” which begins
with Trifilio strumming a guitar and de-
scribing a growing space between her and
a partner. Her lyrics are simple and blunt,
as if she were teaching verb conjugation
to a remedial English class: “You love
me/I love you/You don’t love me any-
more/I still do.”
Partly because of the band’s name,
Beach Bunny’s music has occasionally
been characterized as “beach rock” or
“surf pop”—a handy way of indicating
how palatable and sweet the songs are.
In fact, the group hews more closely to
indie-rock bands of the nineties and
