BELLHEAD’s “Threats” EP Is a Loud, Grit-Soaked Middle Finger to Mediocrity

Let’s get one thing straight: Bellhead doesn’t need your guitars. Never did. While everyone else is out here polishing their pedals and recycling the same tired post-punk tropes, Chicago’s infamous bass duo just dropped “Threats”, a 7-track bulldozer that doesn’t ask for your attention. It takes it, duct-tapes it to a chair, and makes it listen.

For a band with zero six-strings in sight, Bellhead makes more noise, and more sense, than most of the leather-jacketed revivalists choking the scene. With “Threats”, Karen Righeimer-Schock and Ivan Russia sharpen their dual-bass sound into something mythic and merciless. It’s dirty. It’s cinematic. It’s emotionally cracked and bleeding out under a blacklight—and it slaps.

Opening track ‘Threats’ is exactly that: a threat. It creeps in slow, wearing a switchblade smile, then explodes into an industrial-laced pulse that sounds like Bauhaus got locked in a room with a bottle of absinthe and a KORG. There’s no pretense here, just pure, uncut tension wrapped in distortion and spit.

And it doesn’t let up. ‘Heart Shaped Hole’ and ‘Double Jeopardy’ are dirges for the emotionally wrecked, coated in sarcasm and scorn. These aren’t breakup songs, they’re revenge spells. They’re exorcisms done over broken amps and late-night anxiety spirals. The lyrics? Brutal. Honest. The kind of lines that leave teeth marks.

Engineered by Neil Strauch and mastered by Carl Saff, the production walks the perfect tightrope between filthy and focused. Every bassline hit like a wrecking ball dipped in velvet. Every beat stomps like it means it. It’s the kind of mix that doesn’t care if you’re ready, it assumes you aren’t, and that’s the point.

But wait, Bellhead doesn’t just stay weird. They collab weird. There’s a remix of ‘Bad Taste’ featuring none other than Chris Hall of Stabbing Westward, and it sounds like a basement rave possessed by demons with eyeliner. Then Clubdrugs twists ‘Heart Shaped Hole’ into a darkwave fever dream that leaves you disoriented, aroused, and maybe a little cursed.

Visually, the duo has swapped their iconic black-and-white aesthetic for bold-ass yellow—a subtle switch, maybe, but one that screams defiance and reinvention. It matches the music: confrontational, alive, unbothered.

This isn’t an EP. It’s a manifesto. A sonic Molotov. Bellhead didn’t come here to make friends—they came to remind you that vulnerability can be violent, bass can be holy, and yes, two people can make a room shake harder than your favorite five-piece band.

Fifty shows in a year? Believe it. Bellhead isn’t a studio side project, they’re a live wire with fangs. And “Threats” is proof that when you strip the bullshit away, all you really need is guts, distortion, and the nerve to mean what you say.

So if your playlist’s been feeling a little too safe lately, do yourself a favor: put “Threats” on. Loud. No apologies. No escape. Just you, the noise, and the truth.