Beast

"Creeplife" is an act of gleeful self-possession, the sound of two people deciding to weaponize the ways they've been othered. The track opens with a guitar tone that's been deliberately uglified — fuzzed and distorted past the point of radio-friendliness — and the drums arrive with a lumbering stomp that suggests a march more than a groove. There's a humor here that's harder to find in Deap Vally's more confrontational tracks, a theatrical quality to the delivery that feels almost performative in the best sense: Troy inhabiting the role of the weirdo, the outsider, the one who makes people uncomfortable and has decided to make that into an aesthetic. The vocal performance is cartoonishly large in moments, pulling back into a sardonic mutter in others — it mirrors the way the song itself wobbles between heavy and playful without ever quite settling. Lyrically it's a celebration of existing outside acceptability norms, though framed without any of the self-pity that often attaches to outsider narratives. The cultural context is the Los Angeles DIY underground of the early 2010s, a scene that was recuperating rock and roll's capacity for transgression at a moment when mainstream music had largely given up on it. You'd reach for this song when you need to feel proud of the things about yourself that other people find strange — a reminder that deviance, in the right light, is a kind of power.