Bikini Beach - Cursed (PRE-ORDER)

Voracious caterpillars and beautiful butterflies. Fuzzy riffs and sugar-sweet melodies. Bikini Beach focus on contrasts on their new album. “Cursed” is album number seven by the border crossers from Lake Constance. Singer and guitarist Nils Hagstrom and bassist Charlotte Love live in Constance, while drummer Manuel “Flip” Oetlli comes from nearby Switzerland.

“Everything has been cursed since 2020,” says the band, explaining the album title. “When we were in the studio for our fifth album “Atoll”, the coronavirus pandemic had just started. This not only completely overshadowed the release and the upcoming tours, but also brought with it a lot of disaster, fear and chaos. Not even two years later, the war broke out in Europe and is still going on. I wonder what other shit is coming our way?”

In 2025, Bikini Beach sound gloomier than ever. No wonder, with all the shit going on around us. The lyrics are about very personal problems or anger at the situation as a whole. The planet is going to the dogs, Nazis and populists are celebrating election victories and bombs and cruise missiles are flying in the neighborhood. “We are aware that, on the one hand, we live in a super privileged society, but at the same time we are sometimes simply stunned by current events,” says the band.

May The Fuzz Be With You

Nevertheless, there is this wonderful music. Guitarist Nils, bassist Charlotte and drummer Flip take us by the hand and pull us into the furthest corner of the rabbit hole. Where the carrots are blue, the floor glows and the dandelion leaves taste like marzipan. Wonderfully scratchy lo-fi sound, cultivated slacker attitude. With a pinch of surf and psychedelic. The best sixties garage sound from the hit factory of Fuzztones or Miracle Workers. But the fuzz darlings from Constance have nothing to do with the heroes of the Eighties.

“We actually didn't know these bands until recently,” says Nils about the roots of Bikini Beach. “There's actually no connection to the Eighties or the Seventies. They were only oriented towards the sixties, like us. Our roots go back to the early albums by Ty Segall, Thee oh Sees, sixties garage like Them, Link Wray, or quite simply the Beatles. Sometimes classic black metal licks, Joy Division vibes or Nirvana-esque riffs creep in.”

Declaration Of Fuzz

The production of “Cursed” was once again pretty DIY. Bikini Beach recorded most of it in their own rehearsal room on Lake Constance. They recorded the drums again in the Elbdeich Studio in Hamburg with their label boss Velvet Bein. Flip did the finishing touches at home, recorded percussions and made weird synth noises, and you can hear his mother singing on the backing vocals again at the end. Great.

The band was able to recruit a real expert for the mix: Ärzte bassist Rodrigo “Rod” González. “He had already mixed our single last summer. We realized then that working with him was great and that he could implement all our wishes perfectly. It worked perfectly again this time, we are really more than happy with the result,” enthuses the band.

Until The Fuzz Takes Us

Bassist Lotti is responsible for the colorful artwork, which looks like something out of a biology book. “When it came to the album cover, we thought long and hard about who could do it,” says the band. “In the end, Lotti wanted to illustrate something in the style of Maria Sibylla Merian, a great scientist and artist who studied insects. We found the contrast between a beautiful illustration and something as disgusting as insects simply fitting.”

- Wolfram Hanke (Zündfunk, Ox)

Tracklisting

Birth of the Curse
Cursed
Last Words
I Feel
Family
Liar Liar
Until You Die
Blue
Miles From My Mind
Beg For Mercy
Introvert
1986
Cursed Century