On the video-sharing platform TikTok, there are nearly seventy-four million posts hashtagged #promqueen. Hundreds of thousands of these are set to a track of the same name, from 2018, by a young indie-rock band from Chicago called Beach Bunny. TikTok, which encourages users to post short, surrealist interpretations of memes and dance moves, has become an incubator of musical talent, or at least of persona and digital acumen. Earlier this year, it helped send the rapper Roddy Ricch’s song “The Box”—which features a curious squeaking sound, perfect for TikTok—to the top of the Billboard charts. But, unlike the idiosyncratic hip-hop that typically takes hold on the platform, “Prom Queen” is a doleful ballad. The song dramatizes teen-age self-doubt and has the inverse effect of a pep talk. “Shut up, count your calories,” Beach Bunny’s front woman, a twenty-three-year-old recent college graduate named Lili Trifilio, sings in a disaffected tone. “I never looked good in mom jeans.” TikTok users, most of whom are in their teens or early twenties, have used the song as a backdrop for videos both literal and abstract. In one, a young woman presents an array of prom dresses, prompting her followers to help her decide which to buy. In another, someone splices together short clips of the food she’s eaten that day—quite literally counting her calories. One user attempts to follow a Bob Ross painting tutorial; another tries to cover up his face tattoos with makeup, sporting a sly grin.
Of all the confessional, female-fronted indie-rock bands to flourish in the past decade, Beach Bunny is perhaps the most shrewdly tailored to the whims of the social Internet, where everything, especially the misery and humiliation of youth, is molded into a bite-size piece of comic relief. On “Painkiller,” a song from Beach Bunny’s 2018 EP, also called “Prom Queen,” Trifilio name-checks pharmaceuticals that might make her feel better: “I need paracetamol, tramadol, ketamine. . . . Fill me up with Tylenol, tramadol, ketamine.” It sounds like it could be from the soundtrack of “Euphoria,” HBO’s breakout show about teen-age dereliction. Trifilio is a potent lyricist who tends toward despondency, but her songs are deceptively snackable—each is a two-minute burst of honey-butter melody, often with a title that incorporates hashtag-worthy slang.
Yet, despite Beach Bunny’s pink bubble wrapping, the band’s début album, “Honeymoon,” which came out this month, outlines the silhouettes of despair and longing with an unusually refined emotional nuance. “Honeymoon” follows a relationship in its turbulent early stages. “Maybe we are getting too close,” Trifilio sings on a song called “Cuffing Season.” The title comes from a term for the coupling up that occurs during the winter months—a cloying reference that masks the song’s subtle exploration of romantic uncertainty. “Sometimes I like being on my own / I’m afraid of winding up alone / But that’s not love,” Trifilio sings. Unlike many in her cohort, who favor lyrical complexity, Trifilio is exaggeratedly plainspoken. The strongest song on the album is “Rearview,” which begins with Trifilio strumming a guitar and describing a growing space between her and a partner. Her lyrics are simple and blunt, as if she were teaching verb conjugation to a remedial English class: “You love me / I love you / You don’t love me anymore / I still do.”
Partly because of the band’s name, Beach Bunny’s music has occasionally been characterized as “beach rock” or “surf pop”—a handy way of indicating how palatable and sweet the songs are. In fact, the group hews more closely to indie-rock bands of the nineties and two-thousands like Built to Spill and the Strokes, which filled the spaces between grunge, punk, and emo, and probably avoided the beach. Beach Bunny’s tracks are not exactly innovative—most contain an uncomplicated chord progression, a frenzied drum explosion, and not much else. If Trifilio sounds like anyone, it might be the late Dolores O’Riordan, of the Cranberries. Trifilio likes to add a light Celtic trill to her words to make them fit a musical measure; she sometimes turns the word “love” into “lay-ee-ohhve.” This tic can be heard in guitar rock everywhere these days, though this is probably an accident, not an intentional tribute. The Internet’s memory is rapidly shortening. Beach Bunny may not even know that its name sounds like a reference to a time in the late two-thousands when indie-rock bands were naming themselves things like Beach Fossils and Wavves. When a journalist compared Trifilio to the grunge icon Liz Phair in an interview last year, she admitted to being unfamiliar with Phair’s work.
Acts of earlier eras could more easily be traced to their predecessors, often by the artists’ own admission, but Beach Bunny comes from a generation for which stylistic influence is absorbed through lifelong exposure to a mass jumble of online reference points. Trifilio got her start in music by performing acoustic-guitar covers and uploading them to YouTube, as so many of her peers did before TikTok began pulling aspiring talents into its slipstream. One song she covered was Katy Perry’s “E.T.,” a faintly industrial-sounding collaboration with Kanye West. In a track on “Honeymoon” called “Ms. California,” Trifilio sings, “She’s your girl / She’s all in your pictures / California girl / I wish I was her.” It’s hard not to hear this song as a kind of garage-rock photo negative of Katy Perry’s “California Gurls.” An homage like this would have seemed incongruous in an earlier era of indie rock, but Trifilio’s generation uses pop songwriting as a primary source rather than as a counterpoint, translating it effortlessly.
TikTok is a new platform, but its catchy, looping clips make use of an old music-industry trick. Psychologists and music-theory scholars have long studied the brain’s response to repeated exposure to music. As early as 1903, Max Friedrich Meyer, a professor of psychoacoustics, showed that a piece of music’s “aesthetic effect” for participants in a study was “improved by hearing the music repeatedly.” In 1968, the social psychologist Robert Zajonc coined the term “mere-exposure effect” to describe this phenomenon. According to Zajonc’s findings, appreciation of a song increased the more the subjects heard it, no matter how complex the music was or how it aligned with their personal tastes. This insight is the driving force behind the marketing of popular music in the modern era: FM radio stations and popular streaming playlists are most successful when they program a small pool of songs, inducing the mere-exposure effect as quickly as possible.
On TikTok, the length of a video is restricted to sixty seconds, but most clock in at less than half a minute. The app allows a seamless scroll through videos, demanding rapid-fire consumption. It also groups together clips that contain the same song, encouraging you to listen over and over again. The app’s success at making hits is partly due to its ability to accelerate the mere-exposure effect, making songs familiar at warp speeds. Without TikTok, it’s unlikely that a song like “Prom Queen” could have reached the velocity it did. The official video for the song now has more than seven million views on YouTube.
With increased exposure comes increased scrutiny, and the micro-virality of “Prom Queen” caused some listeners—maybe ones who caught only a snippet of the track—to question its message. In one verse, Trifilio sings, “I’ve been starving myself / Carving skin until my bones are showing.” Last summer, Trifilio pinned a lengthy comment underneath the song’s YouTube video. “Since this video is blowing up I feel the need to address something,” she wrote. “The lyrics are a criticism on modern beauty standards and the harmful effects beauty standards can have on people. . . . You are already a Prom Queen, you are already enough.” The message was about two hundred words—a longer piece of writing than any Beach Bunny song. ♦
A previous version of this article incorrectly named the Cranberries singer to whom Beach Bunny can be compared.
