PUREST FORM’s latest single, ANIMAL, opens with electronic menace. A blunt industrial beat stomps into view, guitar slashes scrape across the machinery, and Story Beeson’s voice carries the command of somebody who has already located the emergency exit. The Los Angeles trio wanted “White Zombie meets Underworld,” which sounds on paper like a backstage argument at a 1997 festival, yet the combination proves remarkably natural.
Beeson, guitarist and programmer Madi Woodward, and bassist Riley Oikawa-Dahlson bring hardcore discipline to music designed for bodies in motion. ANIMAL pivots between serrated riffs, fractured breakbeats, low-end pressure, and sudden structural swerves, but every turn feels purposeful. The track has muscle, sex, and a mean little grin. Its aggression never becomes gray sludge; there is too much rhythmic wit in the programming, too much snap in the bass, and too much pleasure in the collision between metal weight and acid-house momentum.
There is also a refreshing lack of genre etiquette here; stylistic boundaries are treated as petty municipal ordinances, useful mainly for telling dull people where to stand, then barrel through them with the cheerful confidence of repeat offenders. Beeson’s performance supplies the volatile center. She delivers each line as though language has become a physical object requiring immediate disposal, shouting near the edge of collapse while retaining enough control to sharpen every phrase. Around her, Woodward’s guitar behaves less like decoration than a damaged power tool, while Oikawa-Dahlson keeps the track planted firmly enough for the electronics to lunge, buck, and misbehave.
The video, directed by Beeson, extends the song’s argument into the realm of surveillance horror. “The video takes on the horror of surveillance,” says Beeson. “While using a lot of throwback technology, mostly to pay homage to its influence – Peter Christopherson’s video for Ministry’s Over The Shoulder, it very much intends to communicate how more modern technology is being used for violence against our communities and humanity as a whole. It fits with the concept of ANIMAL: whether the nature is sexual or simply a desire to exist, we deserve to have freedom and we must take that freedom back.”
Watch the video for Animal below:
That conviction also drives RESISTANCE, the six-track EP arriving September 4 through Dais Records. Written amid fires, displacement, ICE raids, and the grinding obscenity of late-stage capitalism, the record channels anger toward collective action rather than private despair. “Resistance, less of an idea, more of an absolute action that has to be taken,” asserts Beeson.
ANIMAL makes that action feel immediate, physical, and dangerously enjoyable. Revolution may remain poorly organized, but PUREST FORM have at least supplied it with a better bassline.
Listen to ANIMAL below and order the single here.
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