Brooklyn-based dance punks Bear Hands — Dylan Rau (vocals, guitar), Val Loper (bass) and TJ Orscher (drums) — formed back in 2006. They gained early attention with 2010’s “What a Drag,” which led to the trio signing with Cantora Records, who released their full-length debut, that year’s Burning Bush Supper Club. 2014’s sophomore effort Distraction was a critical and commercial success with the album reaching #23 on Billboard‘s Heatseekers chart. The trio followed up with 2016’s You’ll Pay For This and 2019’s Fake Tunes. 

The band’s Dylan Rau relocated to a tiny town on the Oregon coast in 2019, where he made an attempt to step back from music, spending his time “chopping some wood and learning how to use power tools.” For Rau, those activities proved to be passing fancies, the adopted passions of a five-year role playing game as a different person. “I don’t really know how to stop writing songs,” Bear Hands’ Rau says. “Even if no one is listening or we have no team or infrastructure supporting us, I like to think we’d be like those graffiti artists who paint in the subway tunnels where no one will ever see it.”

New songs were shaped was shaped remotely over the following few years between band members on opposite coasts.

Along with producer, collaborator and touring guitarist Alex Marans, the band reconvened in Cherry Hill, NJ for in-person recording sessions fueled by generic pharmaceuticals and a persistent fear of irrelevance. Marans wrote some guitar leads and also prepared elaborate breakfast scrambles on most mornings. Finishing touches were put on by co-producers Elliot Kozel and Caleb Wright.

“The record is mostly about trying to keep it together when it’s already fallen apart, learning skills that no longer have any applications today and true and total pointlessness,” the Bear Hands frontman explains. “Kinda like singing into the void to see if we hear anything back, but your headphones no longer connect because the void updated its hardware and doesn’t have an aux jack anymore.”

“This album was a heavy ass lift and took forever to get done,” Rau adds. “Some of the songs are five years old and have changed a lot since inception. Being the only person on the West Coast meant we had to work through email or have intensive face-to-face sessions when I would go to Philly for a week or whatever. That kind of time sensitivity can make things kind of volatile emotionally.

“If you just get a little something done on most days, you’ll eventually reach the finish line. Maybe,” he adds. “Or at least we did.”

Slated for an October 18, 2024 release through the band’s long-term label home Cantora Records, The Key To What will feature the previously released “Intrusive Thoughts,” a track that features glistening synth stabs, a sinuous bass line and percussive, skittering, twitter and woofer rattling thump paired with stream-of-consciousness-like lyrics that capture the irritation, confusion, self-doubt, self-flagellation and doubt of intrusive thoughts with an uncannily precise psychological detail.

“’Intrusive Thoughts’ is the song that’s playing in my head all day and I can’t get it out,” Rau explains. “Not that I really want to. Well sometimes I do when I’m trying to do basic math or pick a restaurant to eat at with my girlfriend. I think I wrote it about being bored of everything and feeling dissatisfied with everyone and everything around me. Not that I’m super misanthropic in general but this song might make you that way if you get it stuck in your head so watch out.” 

“Adderall/Ambien,” The Key To What‘s latest single is a mind-bending electro slog featuring woozy and glistening synth arpeggios, swirling and ambient synths, skittering and plinking beats, a Gorillaz-like acoustic guitar-driven bridge paired with Rau’s dreamily distracted falsetto delivery and a pitched down vocal for the song’s ridiculously catchy hook and chorus. The effect is a song that feels like a pleasant trip that has suddenly taken a comically menacing left turn. Drugs are good — until they’re bad, y’all. And sometimes, the bad can be interesting. “This song chronicles a personal history with drugs and includes a discussion of which ones will ruin your life and which ones will make life worth living,” Rau explains. He further notes, “Your mileage may vary!”  

Directed by Rau, along with old friend and acclaimed photographer Christopher Saunders and producer Ursula Strauss, the accompanying video for “Adderall/Ambien” was conceived as a more malevolent sequent of their video for 2014’s “Agora.” The video follows the band’s Rau, seemingly alternating between both opped up and listlessly tuned out, doom-scrolling, watching TV. Rau says “the visuals for ‘Adderall / Ambien’ paint a portrait of life in the grip of addiction and isolation whilst also having a pretty good time.”