Over the last decade, SPIRIT OF THE BEEHIVE have been honing an utterly singular aesthetic. They fragment samples, chew them up, spit them back out — like feeding a baby bird. Across four albums and several EPs, Zack Schwartz, Corey Wichlin, and Rivka Ravede have cemented themselves as some of rock’s most eccentric and brilliant deconstructionists. Hypnic Jerks (2018) was a study in noise-punk sampledelia and marked the band’s turning point. Frank Ocean became a fan, spinning “fell asleep with a vision” on Blonded Radio. Then ENTERTAINMENT, DEATH (2021) delivered a raw dream-pop sound, somewhere between K-Mart realism and the feeling of channel-surfing on an old TV set. On August 23, 2024, SPIRIT OF THE BEEHIVE will release YOU’LL HAVE TO LOSE SOMETHING via Saddle Creek. The band’s most recent release, i’m so lucky (2023), explored the breakup between Schwartz and Ravede, setting the emotional stage for their fifth album, YOU’LL HAVE TO LOSE SOMETHING. This new work is the most crystallized version of the group’s aesthetic — a sustained meditation on endings and the instability they bring. It’s a meticulous, beautiful, and quietly devastating collection of songs. At times, it feels like listening to a Walkman in the middle of a hurricane, or like those YouTube videos you binge in bed for 18 hours straight after breaking your wrist in a skateboarding accident. The goal in creating YOU’LL HAVE TO LOSE SOMETHING was to smooth out some of the edges. “Less sharp turns,” says Wichlin. “We wanted to make something intentionally less antagonistic,” he jokes. In practice, this means fewer jarring arrangement shifts and a cleaner, more streamlined sound. A prime example is “I’VE BEEN EVIL,” one of the album’s latest tracks. It’s straightforward: steady tempo, no digressions, carried by hazy guitars and whispered vocals. The song feels tired, like a murmur. The line “I’ve been evil” lands like a shrug — a “so what?”, almost amused. Far less direct is the sublime “LET THE VIRGIN DRIVE,” a genuinely unsettling pop track built from distorted Japanese city-pop samples and a warped snippet of someone screaming on the news. Written around the ENTERTAINMENT, DEATH tour, it took years to take shape. It’s like staring straight at the sun, or waking up inside a body bag. “It’s about unrequited love and inventing a whole situation or life in your head,” explains Schwartz. “The other person finally ‘sees you’ and your ‘problems are solved,’ but in reality they’re not.” The track hiccups and trembles — you hear tape hiss, instability, the sense that everything could be sucked into a black hole’s event horizon. “Heaven is a lie/cause you are earthly/and you’re alive,” Schwartz sings in the opening line. YOU’LL HAVE TO LOSE SOMETHING is an album of provocations. It wants to convince you it’s just rock ’n’ roll, pure pleasure. But beneath the surface lies a collection of songs as complex as ever. “FOUND A BODY,” led by Ravede, drifts as a downtempo cloud of synths. “Found a body,” she sings, “No one can touch me.” Meanwhile, “SUN SWEPT THE EVENING RED” starts out strangely upbeat before collapsing into an avalanche of muddy guitars, auto-tuned voices, and a torrent of strings. As with all SPIRIT records, it’s music built from three distinct voices, written independently and then pieced together. Despite being written in different parts of the world — Ravede in Portugal, Schwartz and Wichlin in Philadelphia — the trio converged on the same themes: the brutality of facing reality, the lies we tell to shield the heart. Schwartz says he writes almost in stream of consciousness. During the creative process, the band listens to very little outside music. The result is an album that builds its own world: where chaos is carefully orchestrated, where relaxation is an illusion, a trick mirror.