Back when Sleigh Bells first burst into view with their jagged, sugar-coated noise pop, it felt like they were pulling from wildly disparate universes. Derrick Miller’s colossal, thrashing guitar belonged in a mosh pit, and Alexis Krauss’s ultra-sweet, bubblegum vocals seemed more at home in a cheerleader chant. It was weirdly niche and they didn’t quite fit anywhere, too noisy for the indie crowd, and too cutesy for the metal crowd. That makes the release of Bunky Becky Birthday Boy all the more fascinating, because the world has caught up. Whether it’s Poppy, 100 Gecs, or the rising wave of maximalist electro-metal hybrids, the sonic palette Sleigh Bells helped pioneer is now baked into the DNA of modern pop music. The trends have arrived at their doorstep.

They’re no longer the outsiders, and Bunky Becky Birthday Boy feels like a victory lap. Without ever chasing the zeitgeist, they’ve landed right in the middle of it.

Early Sleigh Bells releases often leaned on big lurches between verse and chorus and jarring tempo shifts, but this one flows. It’s a smooth thirty minutes of bubblegum apocalypse. There are chunky, gated guitars and the drums slam, everything tightly glued together with hooks, harmonies and layers upon layers of sound. Alexis’s voice is tracked and retracked, harmonised, whispered, giggled, chopped, and bounced around in every direction, and she sounds absolutely radiant. There’s a huge 80s energy to the whole album, but unlike the cold synthwave revival this feels warm, human, and joyous, like being on a trampoline in the middle of summer.

The choruses are designed to knock your socks off. Badly feels like the soundtrack to a Baywatch star being shot out of a glitter cannon. The whole album screams “Get to the beach, NOW!”

The opener Bunky Pop introduces each sonic ingredient one bar at a time, with every layer intensifying until you’re hurtling through a technicolour cartoon tunnel of sound. A dazzling start to the album, they’re daring you to keep up, and there’s a joyful abandon to the whole thing, reveling in melodrama, leaning into cringe, and asking you to stop holding back. Sleigh Bells are still in love with what they do, and more confident than ever in how they do it. Alexis Krauss’s performance is huge, full of whoops, whispers, giggles, and powerful belted choruses that sound designed for sports montages. What Bunky Becky Birthday Boy offers is a full-throttle embrace of feeling, colour, sensation, and joy. Every kick drum is huge. Every guitar is oversized. There’s just so much going on, all executed with absolute precision.

Sleigh Bells were once on the fringe, but time has finally caught up with them. In a sonic landscape where maximalist chaos is now a mainstream virtue, where hyperpop and digi-metal all trade in exactly the kind of bombastic contrasts Sleigh Bells pioneered, they now sound utterly at home, and yet they’ve chosen to pivot backwards toward the even more exaggerated polish of the 1980s. It’s overproduced in all the right ways. Sleigh Bells are blasting forward with even more sparkle, more sugar, more joy, and more punch than ever before.