For all its earth tones, all its ripped jeans and flannel and grit, the Nineties grunge scene flew close to the surreal in its lyrics. Courtney Love divided herself into inanimate objects like a Hans Bellmer photo on Hole’s “Doll Parts”; Mary Timony became a sickly plant on Helium’s “Pat’s Trick”; and Kurt Cobain went from building trees and planting houses to crawling back up into the womb by the umbilicus on Nirvana’s “Breed” and “Heart-Shaped Box,” respectively. It was a freaky time for rock—at least on the page.
Today, the Nashville band Bully reenacts the canonical grunge sound faithfully, which makes sense: lead singer and guitarist Alicia Bognanno, who does double duty as her own band’s producer and recording engineer, learned her chops during an internship at the studio run by Steve Albini, the guy behind the boards for Nirvana’s In Utero and PJ Harvey’s Rid of Me sessions. But Bully avoid performing strictly as a period piece thanks to Bognanno’s lyrics, which sidestep grunge’s fantastical poetics in favor of more personal accounts. “I think when I first started writing it was abstract, and maybe that was an excuse for me not to hone in on what message I was really trying to convey through a song,” Bognanno recently told Hero Magazine. “I’ve got to sing the lyrics every night for the next two years, so they should matter to me.” Instead of recreating the Rorschach blot scream-a-thons of the ’90s, then, Bully choose to inflate that decade’s raw timbre with words that feel intimate and necessary.
The band’s second album, Losing, is grimier and less sugar-slick than their 2015 debut, Feels Like, where songs like “Trying” and “Milkman” offered hooks so punchy they bordered on pop-punk. Here, by contrast, Bognanno seems frozen in the moment where she’s poised to jump but hasn’t left the ground yet, tensed and ready to strike as she sings out the snags in her interpersonal malaise. More second-person pronouns pepper her lyrics than ever, whether she’s figuring out how to traverse a toxic relationship or nursing one hell of a crush. Her sandpaper scream is still the most immediately arresting element of Bully’s music; when, on “Running," she seethes, “You say I’m running/But I don’t care/I’ll admit it/I get anxious too/Just like you,” it lands less like a confession and more like an uppercut.
Like Smashing Pumpkins did at their peak, Bully tease dimensionality out of their music by emphasizing the similarity, and then the space, between Bognanno’s voice and the guitars that squall around her. She oscillates between a clean head voice and that gutting scream just as bright lead guitar lines poke through the power-chord murk every so often, whether as a placeholder between verses on “Running” or as a way of painting atmosphere, Weezer-style, on “Guess There.” On “Not the Way,” Bognanno even initiates a kind of call-and-response with Bully’s guitars, her scream echoed by a low, grinding chord. She’s the kind of vocalist who doesn’t just float above the rest of the band, but gets down in the dirt to tangle with their sounds. They’re not just backing her up; they’re egging her on to her most cathartic moments.
That catharsis comes full-throttle on “Seeing It,” the heaviest track Bully has recorded so far. The lyrics dart around the singer and someone else, and a secret that’s hanging between them. “I laid down in my bed/Replayed it all in my head/I closed my eyes and I erased your face from my mind,” Bognanno sings. “I didn’t want to/I should put this on you/I didn’t want to.” She drags out that last “to” like a rusty chain while she breaks into the song’s main riff on her guitar, and then, when she asks, “Is it true?/I quit seeing it in you,” the “you” erupts like a firework. Her words stay deliberately vague, but there’s a later couplet that strikes a nerve: “Such a blurry place to be/Stuck in your own body.” These words recontextualize the lines that have come before and the rage with which they’re sung, making “Seeing It” sound less like a breakup song and more like a retelling of embodied trauma, or at least an indirect way of screaming at someone who’s hurt you.
If “Seeing It” touches on some heavy shit long left unspoken—enduring creeps as a woman in the music industry, or really just in the world—then Losing’s closer, “Hate and Control,” finishes the thought with extra barbs. “What is it about me that makes you so uncomfortable?/Can we just exist without your hate and control?” Bognanno asks, and then later answers her own question: “You don’t like it when I’m angry/Tough shit, learn to deal.” It’s a salve for anyone who’s been trying to get free, and particularly anyone who’s gotten yelled at for it. Bognanno puts her anger on full display, inviting everyone who’s felt the same to join in and scream along.
