Sam Ray is the most likable person in indie rock. If you didn’t pick up on my sarcasm there, it’s not your fault; it doesn’t translate well to text. In actuality, many people have many reasons to dislike Sam Ray, from his scathing send-up of Car Seat Headrest to his honest albeit prickly online persona and, perhaps most notably, the needlessly edgy moniker of teen suicide itself. Whether these reasons are valid enough to dismiss his music as a whole is totally your call, but I’m here to deliver the message that Ray’s newest album (and first since American Pleasure Club’s fucking bliss, a dark night of the soul via noise-rock), honeybee table at the butterfly feast, is one of the year’s most moving surprises.
And make no mistake, moving is the best word for it. One could use the term “beautiful,” but you might miss the duality of life and death (and by extension, beauty and despair) really put on display here. Ray was placed on a ventilator in the ICU last year, unable to breathe, and he has discussed extensively the fear of dying at any moment that has lingered with him. The impact, both small and large, is felt throughout honeybee, most notably on album centerpiece “complaining in dreams.” Here, Ray has time to ponder the existential crises we all face and the part he plays in it all.
“Maybe the abuse I put my body through is finally catching up, or maybe I just can’t exist so good when they’ve destroyed every part of the world I’ve ever loved,” he sings softly, before name-checking terrorist cells and burying bodies in sand. “Are you even really dead and gone if they still talk shit about you on a music blog?” he asks. One would be tempted to call the song nihilistic if it didn’t gleam with similar, strongly-worded moments of hope and purity: “You could search the whole world for something to give it meaning/You could trace the patterns or the fractals in the leaves/You could shut your eyes and live in beautiful, dumb hope/Despite it all, you could still fall in love with nearly everything.”
This unbiased dissection of the lives we live within the world around us extends through the album. Dreams in “the black shades of death” and “voices in hospitals” kick off the harsh, claustrophobic noise of “violence violence,” a song sequenced just before the meditative, largely instrumental “coyote (2015-2021),” which recalls the quieter instrumental moments of early Modest Mouse records. The record also features some of Ray’s most accessible songwriting yet, specifically “i will always be in love with you (final)” and “every time i hear your name called,” two of his most melodic numbers since American Pleasure Club’s outstanding a whole fucking lifetime of this. And again, from this review, one would be forgiven to think this all sounds a bit eclectic, but perhaps most shocking is how Ray manages to pull all of these sounds and sentiments together into a cohesive piece of work. By design, “i will always be in love with you (final)” is crafted to bleed into a fuller version of a familiar melody in “new strategies in telemarketing through precognitive dreams,” but somehow, the lo-fi strumming of instrumental opener “you were my star” leads just as well into the high-energy sheen of single “death wish.” honeybee splits the difference between APC’s first album and TOUR TAPE, taking cues from the latter’s diversity and forcing it through the melodic filter of the former, leading to what is easily some of Ray’s strongest and most listenable work to date.
“No matter what you do, it’s all the same/I don’t wanna die, I don’t really wanna live this way,” Ray sings on highlight “get high, breathe underwater (#3)” in a melody that harkens back to the closing refrain of The Starting Line’s “Ready.” While that second lyric could serve as a thesis statement for honeybee, the first line is also telling; later, on “complaining with dreams,” he sings that “Everything is everything is everything is nothing.” A near-death experience will do that to you. Suddenly, the little things like doing laundry or making coffee seem just as grand and integral to life as the actual act of breathing. And when you’re as called to songwriting as Ray is, the pull of creating a record for yourself to work through that is likely next to impossible to ignore. He’s a wildly talented and flawed figure in the scene he thrives in, and whether that is enough to turn you away from his music is ultimately your decision – but for those of us facing similar day-to-day struggles, it feels like a blessing to cope with them alongside one of the best songwriters working right now.