BELLOWS

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“Now the dog barks as you walk by…
Now the sun sets, tell the kids come inside,
Darkness comes soon, dim the whole sky
There’s a dirty little man with a bottle in his hand
And the pigeons and the rats and the money in the back”

These darkly portentous words from “Bureaucratic Tower,” the massive climax of Bellows’ new mammoth double-LP “Que Bello!” suggest a rotten world, an eerily malevolent landscape of barking dogs and menacing men. A startling shift has taken place, a malignant turn.

But these words of rot and portent also belie the album’s duality: over the course of an hour-long double album, veteran songwriter Oliver Kalb expands the sonic palate of the band dramatically, delivering an album of polarity and contradiction. Kalb finds decadence and disposability everywhere in this sunken modern landscape, but also spins tales of the indelible beauty of mythology and history, finding counters everywhere to the ugliness of the materialistic landscape of today.

For each of “Que Bello!”’s visceral one-minute blasts of caustic energy (“FCA”, “Delta9 Self Immolation”), there are equally intricate, labyrinthine songs that expand the compositional boundaries of Bellows’ music (“Chrysanthemum Flowers”, “Bureaucratic Tower”). The collection is woven around lyrics that knit threads of history, mythology and stories of European aristocratic decadence (“To the God Nemesis”, “Venetian Glass”) into a tremendously wide-ranging record that channels ancient metaphors into larger questions about the value of art in the indifferent landscape of today’s world.

“Que Bello!” focuses on disposability – the feeling that we have been asked to accept a world in which art and human fellowship are treated as disposable currencies in a cruel ecosystem of neo-Reaganite consumerism. The album mourns the loss of an old world, channeled through Kalb’s’ own experience living through the life and death of past worlds of New York City DIY and punk scenes – the ghosts of shuttered independent venues, the lost presence of bands that once existed, and community spirit replaced with the unrecognizable New York of today’s social-capital driven art world.

While Bellows’ fifth album Next of Kin saw Kalb finding wealth and joy in loss, the beauty of a world in which things we love are ephemeral, “Que Bello!”, by contrast, looks back in anger: the album is steeped in rage against the loss of a sense of cultural permanence and memory, and the resulting violation of integrity expected of artists in the persona-first marketplace of art-as-self. This backward looking lyrical thread is contained in “Que Bello!”’s propensity to sublimate stories about history and myth into broader meditations on the abjection of an artistic life. “To the God Nemesis” reframes the myth of Narcissus and Echo into a story about two touring musicians destroyed by repeating their own narcissistic lyrical laments day after day on tour. “Venetian Glass” channels the feeling of a loss of permanence and a corruption of the artist-self into a story of the mysterious Murano glass craftsmen of the Renaissance. The song is a melancholy and lightly taunting lament of the loss of a sense of the indelible from our increasingly disposable world of art, its chorus repeated in echoing interludes throughout the record’s two sides: “a glass jar, clear as the sky, bright as the stars, shame that you had to go.”

Despite the piqued heart of the record, "Que Bello!" also finds tremendous hope and vitality in memory and in the practice of continuing to create. The album opens with “Chrysanthemum Flowers”, a clarion call for the whole record, built around the mantra “my chrysanthemum flowers creep, they eternally grow,” an oblique homage to the idea of art and beauty creeping out of the most unlikely places, growing in the cracks of the sidewalk and among the weeds. It’s a message of dedication to continued art making no matter the circumstances, while holding a hope for a better world somewhere in the distance.

“Que Bello!” will be released on June 12th, 2026 through Bloody Knuckles.


Photo Credit: Felix Walworth