James Beastly knows how to build something that hits hard. The desire to reconnect — to strip back the noise of modern life and return to something more instinctive, more essential, more genuinely alive — is a feeling most people carry without knowing what to do with it. We Should Be Animals is an answer to that feeling, made with such a degree of concentration that it’s difficult to listen to in the background.

The spark for the record came from an unexpected place. When the LA fires broke out, Beastly‘s friend and former drummer Jeff Andrews (Cast-Iron Canaries, Return to Mono) came up to San Francisco to get out of the chaos. The two started jamming together, and something in those sessions — the spontaneity, the physical joy of playing without agenda — lit the fuse for what would become this album. Pain sublimated into art is an almost reflexive story, told over and over until it loses all meaning. The mechanics here are different. Beastly takes the question of what it means to live closer to your own nature, turns it into ten charged portraits, and presents them in the language of rock and punk — rough, physical, electric.

The album’s genre logic is structured unconventionally. Indie rock and punk are partners here with classical and jazz — violinist Magdalena Zaczek and saxophonist Patrick Bryers are woven into the sound in a way that genuinely feels organic. Most experiments of this kind end with an obvious seam between the academic and the garage. Here there is no seam, and that speaks to an arranging sensibility operating well above average. The strings and brass work inside the garage sound, not on top of it — and that is a fundamental distinction. They amplify the pressure, and they release it. 

Worth noting separately is the way Beastly constructs the album’s internal dramaturgy. Ten tracks — ten separate stories, but arranged in a sequence with its own internal logic: from the rarefied electric momentum of the opening through the punk density of the middle to the retro fragment at the close. The album moves, shifts its angle of vision, keeps the listener in a constant state of anticipation for the next move. Persona Non Grata is transformed in the process into something unexpected — a figure comfortable at the center of negative attention, one who holds their ground where others collapse. It’s a powerful image, and Beastly sustains it to the end. The tracks to pay attention to first: 

Spring Violets opens the album with a deceptively gentle title and exactly the right energy. Electronics seize the space from the very first seconds, and behind that assault lies a story about masculine romance stripped of all sentimentality. This is motion, speed, the smell of leather and gasoline. Beastly opens the album with a track that explains the rules of the game immediately: everything here will be real. 

Fear of Joy shifts the temperature. Garage-tinged lyricism of light punk, almost a ballad — working-class, soaked in the optimism of people who have gathered in a garage with instruments and concrete plans. The smell of burnt gloves and scorched electric guitars is not a production detail but an ornament. This track is not about how things are made, but about how people think about them. 

The Defeatist is a change of pace — slow and heavy, with the mounting pressure of punk romanticism. Something is released here that is difficult to describe through the standard vocabulary of music criticism: a physically palpable, penetrating energy that pushes through every obstacle, literal and symbolic alike.

The title track We Should Be Animals exists in a different register entirely. A road ballad, keyboards soloing against a backdrop of desert beaches and glowing planets. The album allows itself to breathe, and that breath sounds convincing precisely because it lingers. A light retro dusting, masculine solidarity, a gaze directed forward — the track holds the balance between lyricism and toughness. 

White Dwarf brings back cosmic effects and synth shimmer, turning punk drive into something of wider range. A track about faith that remains when all around is ash — not in spite of everything being wrong, but because everything is right. The difference is fundamental, and Beastly holds it.

The only place the album gives the listener room to breathe is the track Ephemera. Everything else is dense, pressing, relentless. For some, that will be a virtue; for others, exhaustion by the finale. But it is precisely in that exhaustion that the calculation lies: it accumulates deliberately, working toward the final effect of Oh! MockingBird, which sounds entirely different after the nine tracks that precede it. The album is constructed so that its ending feels earned, and Beastly achieves exactly that.

Verdict 

We Should Be Animals is an album that knows what it’s doing and holds its line from the first track to the last. Ten tracks built with the logic of someone who has something to say and who has chosen the right language for that conversation. Punk and indie rock are working tools for Beastly, and he handles them with precision. The guests he has invited elevate the sound to a level where genre boundaries cease to matter — guitars, strings, brass, and cosmic synth effects coexist in the same space without any visible contradiction.

The title We Should Be Animals deserves separate consideration. On the surface, it reads as a call to shed the veneer of civilization and act on instinct. But the album is constructed with more complexity than a straightforward slogan allows. The animal here, as I read it, is not a creature defined by aggression or survival at any cost — it is a creature in full possession of its own positive primal nature. Instinct as clarity. The body as guide. Joy as something worth trusting. In this context, the title reads as an invitation rather than a demand: return to what you actually are, beneath everything that has been layered on top.

Those SF jam sessions with Jeff Andrews clearly left their mark. There is a looseness underneath all this craft — a sense that some of these moments were caught rather than constructed — and that quality is what keeps the record from ever feeling overwrought. Beastly made an album with weight and intention, but also with the particular warmth of music made between friends who were glad to be in the same room. On We Should Be Animals, that turns out to be the most powerful thing of all.

The album comes out on March 20.

*This review was made possible by SubmitHub