“Only Dark Shit” wasn’t an easy title to keep. The cuss in it means YouTube clips honeybee’s videos, ad platforms flag every promotion, and the Cleveland band gets dinged any time they try to push the record online. They kept it anyway. “In the end Only Dark Shit felt thematically right,” they say. “The record is about getting older and dealing with our hurt that we carry.”
They’ve been at it long enough to know what that costs. honeybee formed in 2022, and their debut LP took a year to write and another two years to record. Somewhere across that stretch, what started as a joke between them turned into something they actually meant: slowpunk. The band uses it as both a tag (next to shoegaze and alternative on their Bandcamp) and a working philosophy.
“Slowpunk is about how to be punk when you grow up,” they explain. “You get slower. Go to less shows. You get a mortgage. Which sounds not very punk. But that’s the switch. Get the corporate job. Play their game. And donate. Give. And maybe most importantly, take. Use what you can give to the communities you care about. Be nice to everyone. Hate is easy. Support your friends. Support those less considered. Be empathetic. And most of all, love. Maybe it’s corny. I guess we’re corny.”
The album itself moves a lot. There’s the depth of the recent heavy shoegaze crop, the density Deftones built across records, the post-hardcore openness of As Cities Burn, and traces of what Minerva did with melody buried in murk. Across ten tracks it stays dark and dense without locking into one mode.
honeybee released three singles ahead of the LP, each with its own video: “Chest Pain”, “My Buick“, and “I Remember“. A fourth clip is due in mid-June.
The visuals all lean on photos and grainy footage of the band’s actual lives. “It seems kinda trite to use a bunch of photos and grainy imagery as our visual look,” they admit, “but it felt honest. So much of what we have to offer is our past. Looking at photos is more painful than reminiscent. At the same time there is good. Being around the ugly and dark made us good humans.”
The motifs they brought in across the clips: sitting around the kitchen table, going to hillbilly festivals, being in a lonely house, dancing around a campfire. “Very Ohio,” they call it. “We operated on feel. Does this feel right? Ok, run it.”
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Recording the LP was its own kind of work. “We had to expose our vulnerabilities, play to a click, talk about our ignorances with tones, talk about lyrics. We overshared and cried. We got to a place where this became a cathartic goal and we got closer because of it.”
“Only Dark Shit” arrives May 15 on Candlepin Records, Flesh and Bone Records and Pleasure Tapes, with vinyl pressed at Graveface Records on random purple swirl and purple splatter variants and a Comfort Colors shirt printed by Evil Doer in the merch run.
The release show is the next night, May 16, at No Class in Cleveland with Funeral Commercial, I Hate It Too, and HOSTA. honeybee booked it on purpose.
“Selfishly we wanted a show of all verbed out friends. We admire these bands, and even tho we lack a ton of confidence, we wanted to put together a special show that hopefully people would care enough to talk about. It being at No Class is also meaningful. It’s one of Cleveland’s best DIYs and is hellbent on being supportive and welcoming to everyone.”
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The band’s own write-up on Bandcamp puts it bluntly: “Only Dark Shit is us diving into the dark stuff and taking comfort in that trauma. We’re all old enough and been through enough that we know how to cope and hide whatever dark shit we have, but that doesn’t make us any less human. We’re still here. Still trying, pretending, coping, etc, in the hopes we get to have moments of life, love, and laughter.”
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