BUNNIES Drag Listeners Into a Beautiful Nightmare on “Homunculus”

Most songs are begging for your approval. “Homunculus” doesn’t care if you like it. It wants in your head, and once it’s there, it’s not leaving anytime soon. BUNNIES have been doing their own thing for over 20 years, and this track feels like the purest version of that mindset. No nostalgia bait, no artsy-for-the-sake-of-it nonsense. Just tension, discomfort, and intent.

The song lives in a cold, boxed-in atmosphere where everything feels slightly off. The guitars don’t ring out, they scrape. The drums feel less like rhythm and more like something lurking. Synths smear across the track like fingerprints you can’t wipe away. Over nearly six minutes, BUNNIES build a space that feels claustrophobic on purpose, mirroring the track’s focus on modern evil, complicity, and the way we passively consume it. There’s no spoon-feeding here. You’re dropped into it and left to sit with it.

Vocally, it moves like one body. Performances overlap and shift in a way that feels intentional and a little unsettling. It leans theatrical, but never crosses into gimmick. It’s closer to spoken word dragged through post-punk noise, where every line feels like it means more than it’s saying outright. Hooks aren’t the goal. Atmosphere is, and they fully lock into it.

The Piper Preston–directed video pushes it further. Masked figures, harsh reds, chaotic edits. It’s uncomfortable in a way that feels deliberate, not messy. The kind of visual that sticks with you, whether you want it to or not.

“Homunculus” isn’t background music. It’s a challenge. And honestly, most artists wouldn’t have the nerve to make something this uninviting. That’s exactly why it works.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CrACwvGz270

“Homunculus” tackles evil as a collective system rather than a single villain. What conversations were happening inside the band while you were writing it? We were thinking and talking about many different aspects of evil from a wide spectrum of viewpoints.  When we write lyrics as a collective group, it starts with conversations that can just sort of ramble and go down some winding paths.  We have been friends for so long that when we are writing, we are also just chatting and joking and debating, all the things that friends do when they are communicating.  Someone mentioned the idea of a Homunculus, and we thought that could be some interesting ground to cover in terms of the greater explorative conceptual exercise of writing about  "evil".  Once we had that spark to go from we honed in on more of the specifics of this song, the exploitation of people, power dynamics and how they do or don't corrupt, why evil things happen, who is responsible for "evil" in certain situations, is it societal, is it personal, are we all implicated through our participation in modern rituals, who gets to judge, how are they judgin ya.  Fun stuff like that.  

The track feels intentionally claustrophobic. How did you approach production to create that sense of surveillance and psychological pressure? We like to pack the sounds in there.  Wall of sound kinda style.  Like Wall of Sound meets prog, psych, punkyness (lowercase punk) art rock.  There are often multiple competing things happening in a song; we're not afraid to have stacked, weirdly harmonized out-of-time vocals going over the instrumentation that might also be working on multiple time signatures or no time signatures at all... we find that exciting and challenging, and we hope that potential listeners might as well.  I do see how that could be interpreted as claustrophobic, intentionally or not, that is kinda how we do alot of our compositional work.  Psychological pressure, the signs of our times.  

You’ve been making boundary-pushing music for over two decades. What keeps experimentation exciting instead of exhausting? Progression is life, stagnation is death.  Someday we'll all get to die, but until then, we want to explore, we want to experiment, we want to try it all out.  We're lovers of good music, and genre is just a word. We like to play music freeform and jam and make weird noises and just connect in that way, physically letting the music just spill out, but/and we also like to be very cerebral and contemplative about how we are putting our music and lyrics together. Like puzzle makers.  Like improvisational puzzle makers.   It's a dance between the two approaches, while always holding onto that excitement of experimentation.   We don't usually set out to make a specific-sounding song; we find the sound along the way.  That's the fun.  We won't ever be explorers of the olden times, but we can find an equivalent in the imaginative process.  Can AI do that?  I don't know.  Maybe.  Probably not.  I think we also feel a sense of like, we don't have anything to prove to you, but we've got something to prove.  We are like the Energizer Bunny, just gonna keep on tickin', and if people don't get it or don't like it or can't get down with where we are coming from, well, we're just gonna keep on movin' along anyway, and the times will roll on down. 

The visuals are just as disturbing as the song. How closely did the video concept evolve alongside the music? The video concept was completely put together and executed by the fabulous Piper Preston.  We have been wanting to work with Piper for a while now, and we were just so excited that it finally happened.  The video was conceived long after we finished writing and recording the song, but it is so very apparent that Piper was fully keyed into what we were putting down with the sounds and words of the tune.  Piper had a great crew of people working on this project, and we thoroughly enjoyed what they all came up with.  We have been extremely fortunate to work with some fantastically out there visual artists on all of our videos for this album.  Up the punx up the freaks.   

Do you see BUNNIES as observers of modern culture, participants in it, or antagonists pushing back against it? Oh, all of it.  Outside of BUNNIES, we as people are humanists, we want to be helpers, we want to be part of a vibrant world where everyone has the right to live the life they want to live.  We want to see society continue to progress in joyful and positive ways that support and show love to the marginalized and less fortunate.   We hate bigots and plastic ghouls.  There is a rise in the overall ghoul population in this world, and we systematically oppose that.  Fuckin mind your own fuckin business, you ghouls.   Crawl back into your holes, you evil ghouls.