In a food chain, a big fish eats a smaller fish, then gets eaten by a slightly larger fish, who is then snatched out of the water to be eaten by another predator, and so on and so forth; the circle of life. Playing on this idea,
the Bunny the Bear deliver Food Chain, an album that shows them to be an all-consuming pop music apex predator as they take the choicest morsels from every genre in the public consciousness and turn it into one explosive and chaotic mashup of rule-breaking pop. Blending metalcore, synth pop, post-hardcore, and dance-pop, the band's sound should, by any measure, feel like pure musical chaos. Instead,
the Bunny the Bear have cultivated something that feels like an evolution of pop music, drawing upon the most visceral and engaging parts of the various styles at work in their sound to create something that can't help but draw listeners in. Jumping from soaring choruses to pulsing, nocturnal dance beats to crushing breakdowns, Food Chain is a fascinatingly unpredictable album that seems hell-bent on flagrantly eschewing the rules of pop music while somehow managing to keep its spirit intact. With so many incongruous elements at play,
the Bunny the Bear's sound takes some getting used to, and as such might not be for everyone. If, however, listeners are to reconcile the strange mix of styles as they come screaming at them, they'll find Food Chain to be a surprisingly polished and tightly constructed look at the possible (and possibly frightening, depending on your disposition) future of popular music. ~ Gregory Heaney