Initial Thoughts

Welcome back to Dissection Table, where we splice up an album released in the last five years and let the guts spill out. Our philosophy is that you never know what you might find if you’re willing to take a chance on the colorful unknown: teeth, static, good songs… perhaps. Today on our cosmic spelunking adventure, we’re ripping apart the unusual house built by Spirit of the Beehive in You’ll Have to Lose Something (2024); it’s a house in which every room has mismatching, gaudy wallpaper, and the jarring furniture—stuck to the ceiling—invites only shadows. It’s certainly not easy listening, but if you’re willing to peel back all the colorful analogies and sit with some—to be very generous—unusual time signatures and structural choices, there’s something throbbing and intimate underneath. 

But what is that intimate pulse underneath it all? In my opinion, the album—despite its very disjoined construction—is very clear on its thematic thesis. The last two weeks, I’ve been reflecting bunches on the album’s name, You’ll Have to Lose Something. The album itself seems to be about trying to rebuild after a catastrophic, foundational breakdown, yet the demons of one’s past—addiction to substances, flashbacks to trauma, and grief of losing a loved one—are constantly sabotaging the painful rebirth process. Something has been lost, and yet, to move forward, more loss is required.

Without clogging you up with details, I’ll say my life this last month and a half has been excruciating for me. I’m a practitioner of tarot, and in the ‘biz, we call this a “Tower Moment” in reference to the notoriously most-disliked card in the deck: The Tower. In a “Tower Moment,” the pillars of stability your life was anchored on top of crumble away in the blink of an eye. Your core creature comforts—job, relationship, sense of self—swan-dive off a cliff. You never see these sorts of moments coming; they blindside you, and you're left without the tools to know how to react. And yet, while the pain stings and you gasp for air, the “Tower” card is also famously a card reminding the reader of the expansive opportunities for growth, because hey—if your entire life has been wrecked by a bull in a China closet, then there’s plenty of pottery left to artistically rebuild your display cabinet with, Japanese kintsugi-style. When life takes away your lemons, this album reminds you there’s still a pitcher. In this way, I’ve found the album deeply comforting—like a warm hug surgically spliced in retrospect on my most disturbing, traumatic memories. It’s a hopeful nudge that I can rebuild after disaster and also a gentle reminder that my transformation isn’t complete. There’s probably more to be lost, but amid my grief, also more to be gained.

So far, I’ve discussed the tone of You’ll Have to Lose Something (2024) and maybe vaguely gestured at its weirdness, but before we dive into the song-by-song analysis, I want to try to articulate just how gonzo this album is, free of analogy (but truly, I fear it’s a Sisyphean task). Bandcamp denotes the album's genre as “alternative” only amongst its tags. No other indication of genre is provided. Certainly, it is alternative, but it’s also dream pop sometimes and banshee screaming other times. Between that, it’s also everything in-between: noise punk, distorted electronica, and hazy psychedelia. Song structure is thrown out the window, with songs morphing into different creatures over the course of their runtime. If I can be allowed one analogy, it’s like music for dreams: the second one thing is noticed and tries to take solid form, it evaporates and is replaced by something else. This unconventional pacing requires one to be a patient listener, yet each song is rich with meaning. Truly, this is the kind of masterpiece this website is dedicated to.

Song-by-Song Breakdown

The album opens with the aptly named “THE DISRUPTION (Feat. MSPAINT),” which sounds… disruptive, to say the least. Distorted synths warble until awkwardly anxious drums cut in, accompanied by esoteric lyrics that discuss karmic debt, broken teeth, and gunfire. The guest artist, MSPAINT, raps before proclaiming, "Now you heal," amid the chaos. It sounds like a "Tower moment” in song form. Something coming in to disrupt and destroy that cannot be predicted. Healing feels rushed and sudden. A misguided attempt that cannot possibly come to fruition so early.  

“STRANGER ALIVE” sounds like a traditional dream-pop song sometimes and like a haunted brass band other times. It expounds upon the thesis by personifying the various ghosts of the past that continue to haunt you after a massive life disruption with lyrics like “devotion is a cancer” and “elegy is wasted.” Here, the band feels particularly playful with their sound effects, throwing in interesting soundbites fairly regularly that make predicting where the song will meander next difficult.

“THE CUT DEPICTS THE CUT” is a brutal song that leans more into noise punk influences. The lyrics, like all songs on this album, are a little cryptic, but there’s clearly pain. To me, it seems to be about going past your breaking point and wanting to pretend that something is okay when it’s clearly not. The beginning of the song is particularly strong; I like the more punk influences, and it doesn’t overstay its welcome at all, ending on drums that perfectly lead up to the next song.

“LET THE VIRGIN DRIVE” sounds both like a warning label and a dare; it’s a very cool title, to say the least. In my opinion, it’s the pinnacle of the album and also the most inviting track, opening with a gauzy, dream-pop shimmer layered over soft electronic flickers. For a second you might forget you’re listening to Spirit of the Beehive, until suddenly something darker cracks the audio wide open. The song becomes more distressed—still mellow in terms of the vocal fry, but with lyrics and sound effects wobbly and anxious. Then, the “Tower moment hits”: B-movie horror audio punches through, complete with the horrific audio collage of a child pleading, “Help, somebody help me!” Next, the song begins a slow creak back to normal, returning to its mellow pop self with the word “safety,” but now the lyrics distort. Nothing feels safe. It feels… off… And that’s clearly the point. The music video doubles down, depicting an Asian businesswoman playing stab scotch in her kitchen to disastrous results. A severed finger is shown abandoned in a yard as she runs through the streets and various questionable industrial alleyways in panic with her remaining fingers poorly bandaged. Other characters appear randomly throughout the film, and their role (at least to me) is left unclear. It’s as if they’re distractions from the main narrative unfolding—as if to ask us if we’re paying attention to the disaster or seeking a safe escape by ignoring the elephant in the room.

After the more upbeat world presented in “LET THE VIRGIN DRIVE,” “SORRY PORE INJECTOR” offers a needed reprieve. It begins with a slow-paced instrumental piece that sounds almost shoegaze at times before opening into dream-pop vocals that remain subdued and reflective. The song itself is about addiction and the struggle to maintain stability. It ends on a more orchestral moment with lyrics egging the listener to come find them. It sounds once again like something taken straight from a horror movie, but somehow it works. I remain uneasy but contemplative.

“FOUND A BODY” continues the slower, more reflective pacing with lyrics that seem to be about a child discovering a dead body. The song feels weirdly cathartic, as though it’s trying to take a very painful moment and turn it into something constructive. Something about the wavering guitar and the fuzzy, static-dripped female vocals reminds me of those quiet moments in childhood before and after traumatic moments, the calm before and after the storm, so to speak. Perhaps now I’ll look back at this moment in adulthood in the far future and realize I, too, was standing on the precipice of disaster, unaware of the tornado about to wreck me. Will this be the calm before your storm? Perhaps you don’t know how good you have it.

“SUN SWEPT THE EVENING RED” opens with some lovely guitar work but feels perhaps the most disjointed of any of the songs in the album. At times it sounds like a sparkly, vaguely 80s pop song with its sparkly synths and occasional beat, but just as quickly as one flavor arrives, it sinks away. Other times, it’s more of a lament told through drums. The lyrics suggest a breakup, with “I give you all you want and more; there’s the door.” There’s resentment for someone who refuses to disappear quietly.

Often with trauma, recovery doesn’t happen all at once. The stages of grief aren’t linear, and it’s easy to circle back and forth between the various stages. In “SOMETHING’S ENDING,” there are more references to finding a body, as the obviously named “FOUND A BODY” suggests. The opening lyrics suggest loss compounding and an inability to process someone’s leaving with “They pulled another one out of the river / It looked like you.” In terms of sound, the song is uneasy and glitchy. There’s a grunge to everything that makes it all feel like it's blurring together and about to dissolve.

Themes of guilt resurface with “I’VE BEEN EVIL,” whose lyrics continue to suggest someone has left or died. The world goes on, but change doesn’t come easy, with lyrics saying, “Watchin’ seasons change and me, the same, the same, the same.” There’s a slight return to the dream pop vibe of earlier songs like “LET THE VIRGIN DRIVE,” but the song still feels frustrated, like someone is bracing for trauma with those heartbeat-like drums.

After someone passes, all that remains are the memories attached to things they’ve left behind. “1/500” explores whether this is enough with lyrics like “Nobody left to keep the score when we both supernova / What if a photo doesn’t capture time?” The song begins subdued but feels closer to the acceptance-side of the five stages of grief scale, given the more upbeat pacing.

Those distorted, wavering female vocals return in triumph in “DUPLICATE SPOTTED,” which feels like another high point in the album—a final hurrah before the end to celebrate coming to acceptance. Lyrics are incredibly powerful here, though it might be difficult to make out the beautiful “God pulls the trigger / I load the gun” through all the guitar distortion and synthesizer shenanigans. The song ends with what sounds like a bittersweet movie getting ready to close the curtain. Tender and yet strong in its acceptance of the end.

“EARTH KIT” is one of the longer songs on the album and feels—initially—like the album is overstaying its welcome given that “DUPLICATE SPOTTED” felt like such a good end to me. However, on deeper reflection, I’ve come to think this is the best way the album could have ended. Acceptance isn’t easy, and, as I’ve said, grief isn’t linear. “Who will tend to all you’ve lost?” suggests an inability to completely move on. Anyone who's ever experienced a traumatic loss knows that even long after the end, there are bad days where the pain resurfaces. It’s been years since my childhood dog died, and even still I find myself teary when I look back at old photos on particularly sentimental days. By not ending on the more powerful “DUPLICATE SPOTTED,” the album cements its message.

Conclusions

Dripping with a sense of loss, You’ll Have to Lose Something (2024) provides no easy answers. It won’t illuminate the esoteric secrets of getting over intense pain or traumatic memories, nor does it provide much direction on how to stitch yourself together again afterwards. What it does do is assure you that you're not alone and give you a hell of a soundtrack for life’s more miserable moments. It understands that trauma recovery is nonlinear and reminds you gently that while beauty is possible after the fall from the garden, so is the necessity of sacrificing even more. The promise of transformation is real, but you may not get to decide what stays intact. Like kintsugi, healing isn’t about repairing the fractures but learning to live with them and even—eventually—making them beautiful and shimmer. Spirit of the Beehive doesn’t try to restore things to the way they once were but instead honors what’s broken. You, too, can honor what’s broken for the low, low price of $13 on Bandcamp (YOU'LL HAVE TO LOSE SOMETHING | SPIRIT OF THE BEEHIVE). Thanks for joining us, and we hope to see you next time.