One warehouse. One laptop. One lockdown. Two fathers, funneling their worries into new music from 20 feet apart. If the circumstances surrounding Bearmonster’s new album make it sound like a science fiction tale, that’s because it partially is.

Out of the chaos of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Boston duo of Ken Schopf (drums, backing vocals) and Shaun Wolf Wortis (lead vocals, guitar) have crafted a dynamic snapshot of humanity in crisis with Little, Bearmonster’s debut full-length album. Set for release this summer via YNH, Little harvests the jagged fragments of pandemic living and rearranges them into a 14-track collage of equally jagged rock, creating a sound that’s been chopped up, reshuffled, and artfully spliced together J Dilla-style. While recorded during unprecedented times, Little reaches far beyond the pandemic, capturing humanity’s knee-jerk reactions to disaster, be it cocooning or going batshit crazy. Wortis’ later diagnosis – and recovery from – throat cancer underscores the album’s themes of grappling with mortality, control, and unexpected upheaval.

As society retreated into their homes and themselves in 2020, Schopf and Wortis created this new world from a Somerville warehouse, recording Little exclusively on their laptop. After laying down dozens of instrumentals (plus learning how to navigate the recording software Logic), the duo reassembled their material into a varied but cohesive patchwork of gritty roots-rock, a feat made possible through Schopf’s and Wortis’ decades of shared musicianship and friendship. The pair have weaved in and out of each other’s creative spheres since the early 1990s, most notably in their band Slide. Pieces of their musical past together even worm through Little via snippets of 20-year-old recordings from their old practice space in Watertown.

Schopf’s and Wortis’ 30-plus year relationship has aligned their tastes and musical approaches, with a shared appreciation of J Dilla, The Soulquarians, and Latin Playboys shaping the sonic landscape of Little. Yet amidst the perils of a pandemic, the two artists found a more pressing common ground: A parent’s duty to protect their family.

“We’re both not just coming from similar places, but going through the same shit -- just trying to keep your kids together, engaged, and healthy,” says Schopf. “There’s this instinct to circle the wagons that could be in response to Hurricane Katrina, or could be in response to some sort of other, more homegrown kind of crisis.”

In that sense, Little knows no one time, place, or catastrophe. Snippets from old horror movies interspersed among the album hurtle listeners into the past, as hysteria over monsters and invaders mimics the world’s modern perils. The setting, meanwhile, leaps from intimate, at-home concerns to trouble halfway across the world. “Palpitations,” for instance, provides a sobering reflection on mortality, while “Fear (Panic in Hyderabad),” revisits Wortis’ firsthand account of the virus encroaching upon an Indian city.

“There were rumors of the virus being at the city's edge a bit like Godzilla, and there was a panic,” Wortis recalls. “News crews arrived and filmed people darting around, and I was in an office upstairs and people in the office were watching the panic below. Everyone left, leaving me and a few travelers alone.”

As the opening track, “Fear (Panic in Hyderabad)” serves as a strong representation of Little, displaying Bearmonster’s knack for interweaving found sounds, samples, and their own chopped-up instrumentals. Sirens and street noise from Hyderabad immerse the tune in reality, while Bearmonster’s blues stomp mimes the earth-shattering footsteps of the mythical creature Wortis alludes to. Audio taken from vintage Indian horror flicks further elevates the very real sense of impending chaos, as crowds fled Hyderabad and an eerily watchful security team circled the area with clipboards.

“A lot of times, these movies are about people becoming monsters, and the secret demon seed within them,” Wortis says. “We were seeing that all over the place – this crisis kind of drove people into crazy places.”

Little isn’t afraid to cozy up to those “crazy places,” which often are forms of coping, maladaptive or otherwise. “Dopamine” likens a cycle of doom-scrolling to drug use; Wortis’ woozy vocals levitate above Ken’s simple but steadfast drum beat, simulating the high of constant “tap, tap, tapping” a phone screen (not unlike Poe’s famed “The Raven”). “Burrow” and “Cranky,” on the other hand, speak directly to the urge to hole up in the face of danger – and the cantankerous cabin fever that can ensue once someone locks themselves indoors. The need for isolation grates against an opposing desire for total control, resulting in a “push and pull” rhythmic effect that evolves Bearmonster’s sound from their 2019 EP Confidence Man. Boston mixing engineer Pat DiCenso, whose past clients include GA-20, Arkells, and Oberhofer, provided Little’s final touches.

“It’s really about the feeling that you’re able to achieve, even if the sounds are not pristine or the end product is not some shiny thing,” Schopf adds, citing the raggedness of R.L. Burnside and music in the vein of Fat Possum’s roster as influences.

“The focus of Confidence Man was clearly more on presenting guitar and drums as how we would sound live,” explains Wortis. “With this next record, we threw that out the window and said ‘we don’t even know if we’ll have the chance to do this live, so let’s just make a record that sounds really good to us.’”

When Schopf and Wortis unveil Little to a live crowd, it’ll likely sound different from the recording. Amidst the process of preparing the album, Wortis was diagnosed with throat cancer and rushed into surgery. He dodged radiation and chemotherapy, but walked away from the procedure missing a few chunks of his tongue and tonsils.

“Being diagnosed with cancer was a whole new level of fear,” he reflects. Wortis is now in recovery and learning how to work with his altered vocal chops – what he optimistically views as a “new instrument” to experiment with.

His silver lining attitude rounds out what seems to be one of the album’s core sources of strength: The belief that creativity will always prevail, even in the face of catastrophe.

-Victoria Wasylak, Boston music journalist, June 2024

Bearmonster:  https://bearmonster.band/

Emily Grogan;  https://emilygrogan.com/index.html