In pop, rock and hip hop, Adam Lukach on the best of new releases
With her band on hiatus, singer dives into solo venture
Just like Chicago’s beaches, Beach Bunny has been closed for the summer.
The surf-pop outfit was poised to build on a big start to the year, having just released its “Honeymoon” album and completed the West Coast leg of a planned international tour. Then the pandemic shutdown wiped all that out.
Between the West and East Coast legs of its tour, Beach Bunny returned home to Chicago for what it expected to be a layover visit. Obviously, that turned into a monthslong stay-slashquarantine.
“We’d heard the buzz and stuff, (but) it wasn’t really affecting the shows that much until we played two shows in Denver,” said Lili Trifilio, the Beach Bunny frontperson and songwriter. “And (the) second of the shows, the opening band was just like, ‘We’re not going to play. We’re just going to go home.’ Then like half the people showed up.”
Pretty soon, Trifilio and the rest of the band — a lineup that includes Jon Alvarado, Anthony Vaccaro, and Matt Henkels — went home too, nixing the band’s biggest tour to date, one that had included dates at Coachella and Riot Fest. Not only was it a bummer for Beach Bunny to retreat home, but Trifilio said the persistence of COVID-19 cast a shadow on the creative process this summer.
“In terms of jamming, I would send the boys the songs and be like, ‘OK, this, this is what the EP is going to be.’ ” Trifilio said. “I feel like they’d listen to them, but no one was really thinking about the next project in the moment. I was an optimist. I was like, ‘Oh, this is going to be over by June,’ and then June hit and it’s like a whole other batch of issues.”
A few weeks into a solo quarantine at her apartment, however, Trifolio went to stay at her parents’ home. She had been hanging out with a neighbor who is a producer prior to quarantine, and once she was “bored out of (her) mind” at home, Trifilio decided to pick production back up by her lonesome.
“I was like, you know what? I’m gonna buy Logic,” she said. “I’m just gonna learn it. I don’t really care if what I make is bad. I’m just gonna try to just figure out how this works.
“And I just fell in love with it. It was unlocking a different part of my brain.”
The experiments inspired Tiger Lili, Trifilio’s new “selftitled” project separate from Beach Bunny. She released the first song under the moniker, “Lightning,” on Sept. 1 and said the solo work has become an outlet for the rest of her creative energy.
“I didn’t really want to try to write anything that sounded like Beach Bunny,” Trifilio said. “If you talk to anyone on the team, every week I was like, ‘Oh, I want to make a country album,’ ‘I want to make this electronic album,’ ‘Oh, I want to make this chill beats album.’ And they’re like, ‘We need to figure out what you want to do.’ ”
Beach Bunny has recently felt comfortable enough to get back in the studio and start practicing again, Trifilio said, and it has been fleshing out an EP release with engineer/producer Joe Reinhart, who also worked on “Honeymoon.”
Called “Blame Game,” the release date should be in the next two months.
The EP includes new material from this summer with “maybe a heaviness or a bit more punk sound” to it, Trifilio said. She also pulled back on the sad-girl lyrics, she said, and laughed.
“I feel like quarantine just made me do a lot of reflecting,” Trifilio said. “It was nice having the space to write some songs that were more reflective of situations and weren’t so reactive, which is usually what my songs are.”
Tiger Lili won’t be going anywhere either. Trifilio said she has plans to release some kind of full-length project in late 2020 or early 2021. And it’s one product of quarantine for which she’s thankful.
“I’m really happy that I got to put something out this year with Tiger Lili,” she said. “I doubt I would have started that project if it hadn’t been for quarantine. I definitely would not have learned anything about producing, so I’m grateful for that.”
“It was nice having the space to write some songs that were more reflective of situations and weren’t so reactive, which is usually what my songs are.”
— Lili Trifilio, Beach Bunny frontperson and songwriter.