Noise pop duo Sleigh Bells’ latest is a high-speed scroll through visions of bygone times, smash-cutting classic adolescence and contemporary brainrot.

Sleigh Bells, the noise-pop duo of vocalist Alexis Krauss and guitarist/producer Derek E. Miller, caught lightning in a bottle in their 2010 debut Treats. That record was perfectly emblematic of the early internet: Sleigh Bells’ tracks and snippets had hopped around the blogosphere, gaining momentum in music head circles. The album they comprised was noisy yet earnest, hopeful, and genre-dextrous in a way that belied a true love of genres ranging from R&B to techno. 

Their new record reflects our late-stage brainrot internet: Bunky Becky Birthday Boy is overstimulated, overbearing, and flatly nostalgic. It is the sound of watching Dazed and Confused through our Twitter-CTE’d brains. It is the sound of giving the That ’70s Show kids TikTok and/or amphetamines and encouraging them to start a band. But sometimes… it works. 

Opener “Bunky Pop” is an animatronic-psychotic birthday song that speeds through synths, grunge guitars, hi-hats, and hyperpop. It feels less like weaving through genres and more like MarioKart racing through them, high on a speed boost and the seizure-danger neons of Rainbow Road. It resembles the ironic-surreal smashcuts of the metamodern internet, where overwhelm and disorientation is the point. Yet here, Miller’s production deftly balances the manic elements; “Bunky” captivates and coheres. The energy pulses through his skillful orchestration of kooky elements favorably resembles noise-pop and hyper-pop groups, certainly indebted to Sleigh Bells’ early work: 100 gecs, New York’s The Dallas Cowboys.

Where “Bunky Pop” sounds like a child’s birthday party, “Wanna Start A Band,” “Life Was Real,” and “Badly” reflect adolescence in another era through the prism of modern simulated existence: the first two dump chaotic layers atop classic 80s rock harmonies. At the same time, Krauss sings, “Life was real and dark and crazy,” “desperate, reckless,” and “arrest me, sad face.” The third apes 2000s club pop hits and their infamous obsession on Tonight And Nothing But Tonight: Krauss sings “the party is hotter than we can ever imagine, I’m free as a bird” atop a rubbery beat and period-accurate handclaps. 

Other songs don’t manage to swim against the persistent waves of noise. We hit what feels like the same hard rock wall in almost every track, to varying degrees of welcome: in “Can I Scream,” fun beats in the back of the mix get drowned out by the likes of KISS barging in. A reverb-ed glassy sound during the intro and new wave drumbeat on the exit of that song are much more interesting, and leave a listener begging they’d get some room to breathe. Ditto for the glitchy sounds on “This Summer,” which hits the hard rock wall early but then lays off, which gives the various toys in the mix room to play and build, so that the final crash of guitars and drums feels earned, anthemic. 

Bunky’s apparent concept is interesting: what if we shook together the brainrot and disorientation that derives from one’s attention being grabbed, then thrown away, then grabbed anew in one-second cycles over and over all day every day, with nostalgic visions of a bygone adolescence more real? In its best moments Bunky doesn’t simply combine these eras but see one through the other: “Life Was Real” succinctly filters warm memories of 20th-century youth and rebellion through metamodern overstimulation, ennui, and the knowledge that the present is more symbolic and in the cloud, less literally materially real, than the past. 

But where do we end up? The album seems too consumed by acting out its zany hyperactivity to excel at either nostalgia, metamodernity, or their tension. Highlight “This Summer” eerily forewarns this is our last summer ever, but like the album’s other traces of our TikTok dystopia, only re-irritates our extant pre-apocalyptic apathetic weariness. It leaves a craving for full-out immersions in the modern (see: hyperpop, Everything Everywhere All At Once, Bo Burnham’s Inside, or, hell, video essayist CJ the X’s video essay expounding on Inside) or the simple-in-retrospect past (see: Dazed and Confused). And yet… even if we didn’t necessarily go anywhere, there was something fun about the ride.