Four years since their last full-length album, Sleigh Bells reflect on their journey purpose, furry loved ones along the way, and their new record.
For Alexis Krauss and Derek Miller, better known as the rock-pop duo Sleigh Bells, their new album does not reflect the times they live in: it’s a revolt against them. “I know personally for me, January 2025 has come with a lot of turbulence,” Krauss said. “There’s a lot of disturbing things happening in our world.”
With so much uncertainty and terror around the globe, the duo have found themselves in a strange position. “Where does something like music fit into the moment?” Miller asked himself. It’s an increasingly prescient question. While all around the world, governments fail, hate spreads, and destruction proliferates, how can we smile and dance in times like these? How do we navigate the balance?
A balance has always been an essential component of Sleigh Bells‘ magic. Fifteen years ago, they debuted with the seminal pop-rock album Treats, which is now hailed as one of the most important predecessors to the hyperpop movement. A decade and a half later, Bunky Baby Birthday Boy features the duo’s signature sound: blown-out guitar riffs hammer against twinkling bubblegum-pop synth lines and distorted drums. Meanwhile, Krauss delivers sugary melodies that feel plucked straight from some of the industry’s catchiest pop icons. Sleigh Bells’ sound is tonally dissonant, a mix of heavy and light that seems impossible to square, and yet, there it is.
Sleigh Bells’ delicate balancing act of opposites is more than just a sonic choice. It mirrors the duo’s philosophy surrounding the nature of life. “This album holds both truths, right? Death is on one shoulder, and life is on the other, and you walk around carrying both of those truths all the time,” Krauss said.
Sleigh Bells’ music, in many ways, reflects our modern era of polarization, where culture has been stratified to a breaking point. It often feels impossible to live in one reality anymore. We are constantly inundated with opposing paradigms and seemingly contradictory aesthetics. Like much of the duo’s discography, Bunky Baby Birthday Boy does not shy away from mixing metaphors.
“I think it’s truly, like on a genetic level, I’m attracted to extremes,” Miller said. “So if two is good, four is better. Let’s try eight. How about 16? Whenever there’s a contradiction occurring, that’s when it gets interesting. I feel like Sleigh Bells encapsulates that, just all of the extremes. It’s cartoonish, it’s exaggerated, it’s over the top, and it’s a lot. It’s a big ask.” He then provided an analogy that the best day of your life can change with one phone call, or vice-versa. It’s hard not to see the work’s political implications, given that everyday beauty can so easily be crushed by a glance at one’s social media feed.
Sleigh Bells and their fascination with balance are reflected quite directly in the manifestations of the album’s stars, the rowdy Bunky Pop and her more responsible sidekick Roxette Ric. Bunky is a party-girl rock star who moshes throughout the record without reservation, an ode to the youthful, energetic punkness that Miller and Krauss have always represented. Her anthem, the premiere track “Bunky Pop”, is a jubilant song full of happy plucky synths, thrashing metal guitars, and drums. Roxette Ric is Bunky’s foil, a calmer, mature type. “Oh God forbid, Roxette Ric has some fun before she splits,” sings Krauss on Ric’s eponymous track.
Despite the seemingly one-to-one alignment between the real-life duo and the album’s characters, Bunky was initially conceived as an elegy for Krauss’ dog Rizzy, who passed away in late 2023. “We kicked around the idea of writing an anthem/tribute to her, which ended up being ‘Bunky Pop’. We wanted the music to sort of reflect her on the best day of her life, running around on a beach or in a field, just like a really psyched dog.” From there, Bunky was developed into the hero of Bunky Becky’s Birthday Boy.
“Let’s give her a best friend and partner,” mused Miller. “That way we could reflect Alexis and I a little bit. And yeah, there’s still plenty of fiction in there, but their dynamic is really similar to ours.”
Bunky Becky and Roxette Ric feel almost like projections of the duo’s younger selves, who met a decade and a half ago at a Brazilian restaurant Miller worked at in Brooklyn. There is a vibrancy and crunch to the duo’s work that has always felt inherently young, a powerful combination of teen rebellion and youthful optimism.
“I’m 43,” Miller said, “but I still feel like occasionally it feels harder to fit in with people my age. Once you get a little bit older, they get a little more cynical, a little more reserved. You hold your cards close to the chest, and I’ve never really felt that.” The two seem to find solace in their mutual energy and optimism, and their music is a testament to all of that. “I feel like enthusiasm is something that sort of tends to wane as you get older, and I’m not really feeling that,” concluded Miller.
In a digital age where the story of the short-lived TikTok fame has become all too familiar, more and more artists seem to come and go in the span of even just a couple of months. The classic 15 minutes of fame has become whittled down to fit a more short-form content model, but somehow, Sleigh Bells have adeptly cruised along the fickle wave of the ever-changing pop landscape.
The duo has been cited innumerable times as two of the most important predecessors of the hyperpop movement. As much as they don’t tend to overthink it, they appreciate the love. “It’s incredible and rare,” said Miller, regarding Sleigh Bells’ relevancy among the underground Gen-Z crowd. “Maybe it’s corny to say it’s an honor.”
“It’s always surreal when an artist references you as a source of inspiration. It’s not something you really think about,” Krauss added. “It’s not indifference,” Miller clarified, stating that it’s important that others like his work. “I hope that people care about this stuff. Some of my favorite artists don’t, and that’s cool.” In other words, some artists do their work only for themselves instead of others, but Sleigh Bells cannot be counted among their ranks.
Listening to Bunky Becky Birthday Boy, one can feel the care and love that goes into each song and every dichotomy kept within. “Bunky Pop” is not simply a happy song celebrating life but a beautiful call out into the void, an elegy for a furry companion. The distorted guitar riffs of “Can I Scream” aren’t just an exciting riff to mosh to, but a cry of frustration in the face of an indifferent world. In the last moments of the album, on their final song, “Pulse Drips Quiet”, Sleigh Bells leaves the final word of the song’s bittersweet refrain: “I’ll be true ’til …” It’s an intentional omission, “death” being the lingering, invisible word. Having confronted the dark and the light, the duo decides to keep power from the former.
Art can be a tool, or it can be a diversion. Turning on the radio, one can feel disturbed by the cheery, sickeningly sweet pop music that plays endlessly while death and darkness are systematically strewn about the world. Don’t be fooled by their proclivity for fun and bouncy pop tunes: to Sleigh Bells, their music is no such device.
“It doesn’t feel like a distraction,” Miller asserts. “It feels like a way to balance the scales.”