Elizabeth Miranda
In the dreamy haze of a fictionalized Los Angeles-meets-Tokyo paradise, the ocean spits a disoriented man onto the sandy shores of a beach. The narrative of whatever sequence of events and decisions led the main character of Apocalypse Whenever!, the fourth studio album from alternative pop band Bad Suns, to this close-call, near-death experience is indistinct, but his revelations come in the moment when his fate remains uncertain.
“Once I brought it down to one moment versus several moments, I saw the imagery of your life flashing before your eyes,” frontman Christo Bowman tells The FADER over Zoom. “The way that the music sounded, I pictured somebody washing ashore in this sci-fi, Philip K. Dick sort of environment.” The progression of memories that unfold from there – a fusion of Bowman’s own personal histories colored by that of the people within his inner circle and those indirectly impacting him through them – molds the retrospective whirlwind of Apocalypse Whenever! as the character on the beach cycles through visions of what was and what could have been.
On “Heaven is a Place in my Head,” one of the album’s earlier singles, Bowman sets the scene: “Memory tapes stuck on repeat / Pictures of you, pictures of me / I picture the world we never got to see.” He describes the record’s conceptual creation as “finding the spark, picking it up as a flashlight and investigating, trying to figure out what’s down the road of every song.” Throughout the 13-track sonic expanse built around synths with occasional attention-demanding interceptions, be it by strings or saxophones, he presents an existential questioning of the way fear, regret and self-reflection function when informed by the notions of love and loss.
Leading up the album’s creation, Bowman found inspiration in the dream-like writing of Japanese author Haruki Murakami, particularly this idea of residing in a space that is half-reality and half-fiction. “I wanted to make music that puts the listener in a world like that,” he explains. “That made me feel the way that I felt when I was reading one of those stories, where there’s this question of what’s real?” He wondered about the boundaries of dreams and reality, what separates them and where they converge. In 2019, he followed his curiosity all the way to Japan for some “investigative work in the guise of a vacation.”
“It’s like you enter a dream world when you’re [in Tokyo], you feel like you’re in the future,” Bowman says. “And then you take a train, you’re in Kyoto and you feel like you’re in the past. It’s just all of these different wildly visceral experiences.” When he returned, his heightened inspiration quickly led the singer down a rabbit hole of Japanese city pop, the surreal genre that emerged during the country’s technological blossoming in the seventies and eighties. The music packed in influences from disco and jazz to rock and R&B, but it was this particular element of West Coast pop that sparked clarity for Bowman.
It took him back to the soundscape of Language & Perspective, the debut album from Bad Suns released in the Tumblr-driven indie-pop boom of 2014. The record defined the band’s sound as warm and electric, buzzing with a youthfulness that reflected the perceived coolness of the scene at the time. It followed them to their sophomore effort Disappear Here two years later before they pivoted to the indie-noir of Mystic Truth in 2019 on the hunt for something different. The latter album cycle saw the absence of Eric Palmquist, who produced the band’s first two records. Apocalypse Now! sees his return.
“The most important thing I realized was not being afraid of being put in a box. I got to this point where the band started to sound a little bit familiar to me,” Bowman says. “I started getting in my head about that and I wanted to walk away from it. And then I had this feeling. I was like, well, no one does us better than us.” He realized there was a way to compromise, to do more of the same with enough deviations from the norm that it would still feel new and exciting. He adds: “It felt like we were making the third, proper Bad Suns album in my head the whole time.” Once the full band, complete with Gavin Bennett, Miles Morris and Ray Libby were back in the studio with Palmquist helping to steer the ship, Bowman’s creative renaissance took form.
Prior to Apocalypse Whenever!, Bad Suns hadn’t leaned so fully into one specific conceptual theme – but even this was more of an existential search for meaning and understanding through this character than a sequential narrative. More revisions were implemented on this album than any other in their discography, but for good reason. “Being a songwriter, or being a creative person, I feel like I’m Dale Cooper from Twin Peaks. You’re just trying to follow the clues and find out what leads you where,” Bowman says. “You don’t know what the hell you’re doing the whole time but you end up getting the results that you need if you follow that intuition.”
The album builds itself around subtle thematic nods and clues. And though it's best consumed in order, skipping around won’t unravel the record’s narrative. The collection of memories that play from the perspective of the man on the beach jumps through periods of time, anyway. On “When The World Was Mine,” an eighties soundtrack draws him back to a teenage summertime bliss before life unfurled into a tangled web of emotional complexities. He didn’t know how good he had it then, using “Wishing Fountains” to beg for a time machine in hopes of undoing regretful moments when miscommunication and over-drinking led to overthinking and, later, overreacting. “I’m trying so hard to make it look easy,” Bowman sings. “Falling apart with a smile on my face.”
Reveling in his memories in the sandy expanse near the ocean, the lone character finds a newfound hunger for living. Whether through the crushing grief of “Nightclub (Waiting For You)” or the hopeful adventures of “Peachy,” having his life flash before his eyes made clear that if his arrival on that beach is a second chance, he doesn’t have any more time to waste on regret and worry. Instead, he turns the healing power of falling in love, feeling saved and rescued by it as if the emotion pulled him from the ocean and drew the water from his lungs itself.
A California native, Bowman’s own relationship with the beach is more restorative than transformative. It lends itself to the expansive summer references throughout the band’s discography, functioning more as a state of mind than a season. “I see myself start to drift off and get a little bit lost and a little bit crazy if I stay away from [sunshine, nature, or water],” he says. “Those are like beacons of hope and light in times of darkness for me.” It was in the explosive return of that warm feeling on Apocalypse Whenever! that Bowman unlocked an ambitious drive of his own.
“It's the truest form of self-expression on this record. All the stuff that you're hearing is all the types of music that I'm incredibly influenced by – from synth pop, eighties new wave and Japanese city pop and dream pop and emo and pop punk. It's just the most fucking me album I could think to make right now,” Bowman resolves. “I’ve never wanted to be in Bad Suns more than I do right now.”
