There’s no metaphor in This Ain’t Gonna End Well…. Mean Bikini means it. They just dropped a record shaped by burnout, by watching people sink while the world claps and scrolls past. It’s a front-row scream from inside the mess. From untreated ADHD to losing friends to suicide, from slow grief to queer defiance, the songs don’t search for silver linings. They document what it’s like to try and live honestly in a system that keeps pushing people over the edge.
Built in the small, loud town of Cumberland, BC, Mean Bikini grew out of pandemic isolation and the need to blow off steam. That hasn’t changed. What has changed is their focus. The band—Milly Lyman, Josh Marcellin, Laurie Storrie, and Ashley Gelaude—doesn’t just play fast and loud anymore. They write for the people they’ve lost. For the ones still fighting. For the scene they helped carve out from scratch in a village that didn’t have one.
Their live shows are loud, sweaty, and queer as hell. But this record isn’t just about the party. It’s about what happens after—when your brain won’t shut off, when someone you love disappears, when your body starts breaking down but you’ve still got three more cities to play.
This album isn’t a debut, technically. But it’s the first time they’ve said exactly what they needed to say. And they brought friends. Members of Alien Boys, Shame Banger, Pilsgnar, The Grinning Barretts and more show up across the 13 tracks, adding weight where it’s already heavy.
At its core, This Ain’t Gonna End Well… is about the ways we cope—sometimes badly, sometimes beautifully—with a world that makes less sense every year. It’s about how hard it is to stay upright. And how much it matters to try anyway.
Full track-by-track commentary from the band starts below.
1. Things start of strong with the title track off the album This Ain’t Gonna End Well and really sets the tone for the album with its rancid-esque, in your face bassline and vocals that carry the intensity of the anguish that is present throughout all 13 songs. This track speaks about witnessing people who despite being offered all the help they can get, still allow for their own downfall. We see it in our music scenes with people lacking the ability to be accountable, we see it in our communities with people refusing to be open minded to kinder ways of thinking, and we’ve seen it our whole lives in other spaces.
2. We then jump to the crunchy intro for track 2, As Good As Dead. This is one of the more pointed songs on the album and essentially is about taking matters into your own hands with bigots and people who try to harm folks who are just trying to exist in their own, personal authenticity. This song carries alot of driven anger in it and is broken up with a very pensive breakdown in the middle that seems to carry its own fury and unleash it in the last few lines of the song.
3. Song 3 is the albums single that was released a few weeks before the album and was the song that really changed alot for the band in terms of what they realised they could achieve sonically. Dissociate is about leaving your body while having a panic attack, and it sounds like just that. The song carries itself with a consistent sense of urgency and busyness that is reminiscent of a brains neurons all firing at the same time. With driving drums the whole way though and vocals that span the scale between anguished yells to full on death metal screams, this one really captures the inside of a tortured mind.
4. Song foir is titled 1000 Times Before and is somewhat of an outlier musically that ended up shaping up inn a really fun way. The lyrics speak to something many of us share experience in and that is having your joy, your sense of self, and sense of autonomy ripped away by social media and how it allows us to compare ourselves to other people’s seemingly perfect lives. It’s something that we over tie can become addicted to and we let happen over and over again despite how painful it is.
5. Shakin It Off – the song speaks to the experience of growing up with a neurodiverse brain. For alot of us who experience this, it feels like the world wasn’t made for us and we are unable to ft into the spaces that people seem to be able to exist in with ease. The song is also about self acceptance and recognizing that although we may feel like we don’t belong, we can carve out our own space that we are so worthy of.
6. Chaotic Evil – this one speaks to the current state of affairs regarding the unhoused population and the policies surrounding substances that are causing folks to die needlessly due to lack of supports and general compassion. We are constantly seeing more and more deaths in our communities and some that hit real close to home because really this shit can happen to anyone. We need more supports like harm reduction services and safe supply otherwise the death toll will continue to rise and more and more people will see those we love and hold close taken from them too soon.
7. Bars too low – As political people it’s easy to point out the blatant flaws in the world around us, but we often miss the more subtle ones. We live in a culture ripe with misogyny, homophobia, systematic racism, and class structures that tear apart our quality of life. So many of them are hidden from plain sight, especially to those of us who carry a lot of privilege. This song is a challenge to do better; To not look past the little things, to not get too comfortable in our understandings of oppression, to stay focused and not be distracted by propaganda, to look at the problematic behaviors that are so easy to condemn in strangers, and hold our friends, family, and most importantly ourselves to the same standards.
8. 2 inches to the right – remember when that gunman tried to kill donald trump a while back? This song is about if he had just a bit better aim and how much better off we would be if he did, nuff said.
9. A damn hard day – this one is really near and dear to our vocalist. They had a dear friend take their life last year who happened to be the partner of someone even closer to them. This song was written as if from the perspective of the partner who lost their loved one and is for anyone who has lost someone to their won battle with mental health. It also feature Sarinn of Alien Boys who is one of our favorite local local bands on the west coast ever. We feel the balance between both the vocals really makes this a song about two people and carries the weight of its concept.
10. Executive dysfunction – simply put, this song is about the day to day struggles for someone with an ADHD brain. It speaks to the lesser talked about parts of having ADHD like struggling with relationships, with medication, and just existing in general. We got our pal Pat from The Grinning Barretts and Kaia from The Drink Tickets in on this one for back ups in the chorus and we love what they contributed. This song is truly furious with a lot of pent up aggression from years of struggling just to get by with the hand we were dealt.
11. Growing pains – growing pains is about just that. It’s about getting older and struggling to find comfort in spaces we have loved being in for so long and how over time , it can be just a bit harder to be there despite how much we love it. This one’s for the old punx.
12. Til the wheels fall off – this is our feel good tour song . We’ve been lucky enough over the last 3 years to spend a lot of time on the road and we felt we owed it to ourselves to celebrate that with a song. Load in soundcheck play load out drive, load in soundcheck check okay loud out drive…..
13. Invisible lines – the final song on the album is about our dear friends south of the border . We have been fortunate enough to create loving bonds with a ton of folks in the states, alot of which are queer or bipoc folks and it’s been breaking our hearts to see what’s happening to them at the hands of their government. This tune is a song of support and strength that we wrote for them, and a song to remind them that we are all in this shit together. The song is a duet with Rowan of Seattle based band Shame Banger. It feels so special to share a song for the folks down there, literally with them on this track .
