Hi, Ethony Potano here and I'm here for a review for the new Beach Bunny album Tunnel Vision.

Tunnel Vision is the band's third official studio album, with six EPs under their belt. Formed in 2015 out of Chicago by the band's frontrunner Lili Trifilio, Beach Bunny started off as a bedroom pop solo project, but now after about a decade long career of dominating the indie underground scene through this very lovable, angsty, feminine-forward angle, as well as seeing this huge career spike in 2021 with their song "Cloud 9" going crazy viral on TikTok, fans in the music world alike were very excited to see what they had up their sleeves.

And now after a two year hiatus, we have Tunnel Vision, which struck me as mature and reflective as it is relatable and punchy. At just 30 minutes, Beach Bunny packs a variety of different themes spanning from growing pains to self doubt, alienation, all in a way that just hits really hard throughout the entire album.

Starting with the song "Big Pink Bubble", we have this hugely upbeat fusion of pop and indie rock that soars as this punk ballad and at its core it's painting this very vivid and relatable picture for anyone who's ever wanted to escape their life. The song uses this metaphor of a big pink bubble as this place where you want to escape from all of your shortcomings, your failures, your anxieties, and creating this idealistic bubble where you won't have to deal with them in reality. But what I think is the best part of this metaphor is that while it's very common for anyone to want to run away from their life and their problems in somewhere far more appealing, like a pink bubble, what happens to bubbles? They eventually pop. She paints this idea that the illusion of hiding away will eventually pop and you'll have to face your life and your problems, which she does pretty head on for the rest of the album.

On the next song, "Chasm", the lyrics dive a little deeper, dealing with themes of anxiety, describing anxiety like a chasm in your mind that you desperately want to climb out of. And throughout the song, she describes how even though our past and our trauma can make us stronger, nonetheless it creates this inevitable hole or chasm that we have to overcome in our future.

On this track, I absolutely love that when the lyrics are far more introspective, the song takes a much moodier atmospheric approach. While she's singing with such vulnerability, you really feel like the depiction on the album cover, like you're alone in your room, looking cute but stuck in your own space in yourself afraid of all the ways you have to overcome yourself and your past.

The album takes another turn for the great with the title track, "Tunnel Vision", where she takes the metaphor from chasm and takes it even deeper and darker. She continues to describe this mental plummet into anxiety and saying how once you're in such a hole, it's really hard to see the signs around you. You get tunnel vision and how this tunnel vision that you get from being stuck in this chasm of anxiety makes it really hard to make decisions clearly on this song. It makes me very sad to hear how she feels like a creature learning how to exist for the that she can't trust her own opinions, that she's mentally bursting at the seams. But regardless of how sad that might make me, I think what she's doing on this song is absolutely beautiful. She's painting such a vivid picture of what anxiety really feels like because, you know, if you've ever had it, it feels exactly like that. And to sum it all up in one word: it feels like you're trapped.

Next, we get to my absolute favorite song on the album, "Clueless". Sonically, I love the early 2000s pop punk blend. I feel like I can hear this song in the trailer for a movie starring Hilary Duff, where she doesn't quite know who is yet, but she's figuring it out. She sings the lyrics as well as the shh and badaba's with such dream pop breathiness that it really drives that feeling all the way home. As someone in my late 20s, this is a song that I definitely found to be the most relatable. She's rattling off all these frustrations and confusions that come with being at this stage in your life, being old enough to get married, but being so alienated from that concept that you would feel like a teenage bride, or thinking back on all the friends you thought you would make in college, only to realize that they would all move away. Crying at the doctor's office, crying at the DMV, crying at supermarket. (She doesn't list this one, but it's crying on the subway for me.)

And as she's listing off all these experiences, I think we come to the conclusion that as we get older, even past the awkward teenage years, the feelings don't ever change. It's just different problems at different stages at your life. And while that may sound depressing, it's actually kind of beautiful because dealing with them, dealing with those problems, it's just a part of life. It's hard, but that's what makes us strong, resilient and human.

With all of this wonderful emotional songwriting, there were still a few songs that I thought had some room for improvement. Take the song "Pixie Cut", where she describes wishing that she could give her anxiety a pixie cut and trim it from her mind. Now, I thought that this was going to turn into this really interesting analysis about how pixie cuts are viewed as the antithesis of what's socially deemed as attractive for a woman, and how cutting her mind like a pixie cut would be a way to combat that. It kind of never really went there, and I wish it did.

The song "Violence", too, I wish dove a little deeper into the themes of feeling like the world, our society, our environment is just crumbling around us. But for me, the lyrics never really get much deeper than just a shrug of saying, it's really hard to be human right now.

Yeah, obviously.

With those two things said, I think the album has a really strong finish. With the song cycles where she circles or cycles back to themes of anxiety, she again gets back into the relatability of feeling trapped by societal expectations, feeling like you have to perform for everyone, feeling like you're fighting so hard to be good enough, to even feel like the kind of girl that someone dreams about only at the end of the day, to feel dead inside.

Now that's a big pill to swallow. But I feel like at the end of the song, she comes to this resolution that maybe it's not just her that feels this way, that maybe none of us are living for just ourselves, that this feeling is just a mortal toll. It's part of the human existence. And as exhausting as that truth may be, she comes to this realization that if we all feel this way, the best we can possibly do is our best. All we can do is recognize these toxic cycles that our minds will inevitably go to. Try to stop them. And find an album that expresses all of these feelings when you can.

Because when we can't heal ourselves, music can. I'm feeling a light 7 on this one.

Beach Bunny, Forever.