Album Review: The Raveonettes – Pe’ahi II (Beat Dies Records)

If Pe’ahi (2014) was the violent swell of grief breaking over distortion, then Pe’ahi II is its drowned revenant. The Raveonettes’ tenth studio album delivers an anti-narrative in which wounds continue to echo, quieter and deeper with time. Sune Rose Wagner and Sharin Foo don’t treat Pe’ahi II as a record about what happened, but about what lingers. Written and recorded in self-imposed seclusion, it's a reanimation of unearthing tapes buried beneath a beach house now half-collapsed into the sea. In support of the record, The Raveonettes return to Bucharest for the first time in a decade as they take the Control Club stage on December 13 2025.

What emerges is an album that inhabits the past. If Pe’ahi used the wave crashes, high-speed turns, and death wishes on wax of surf tropes to dramatise emotional violence, Pe’ahi II takes place in the low tide of psychic drift that follows. Where Pe’ahi was driven by the sudden rupture of death, abandonment, and collapse, Pe’ahi II is a more temporalised grief. Tracks like “Z-Boys” surfed with fuzzed-out, muscular guitar drive; “Ulrikke,” by contrast, sits on the sand, frozen in memory and angst. It understands that trauma is a cycle, resulting in songs suspended in unresolved motion. Even uptempo tracks like “Ulrikke” can’t quite accelerate on their own, tethered to something immobilised by entropy.

“Strange,” the album’s opener, arrives as a listless drum loop beneath desaturated synths with Wagner’s voice both a whisper and a memory. Where “Endless Sleeper” (from Pe’ahi) begins in the throes of danger—“With my doors unlocked/Sometimes I take on the ocean”—“Strange” opens inside dissociation. “Whenever we try/It's a waste of my time”, Wagner intones with detachment. Already the record asserts temporal dislocation, unreconciled memory, and emotional recursion as its grammar.

The record's emotional core lies in a trilogy of “Killer,” “Lucifer,” and “Dissonant.” The title “Killer” itself echoes 2014’s “Killer in the Streets”—but where the former flirted with danger and seduction, the latter withdraws into transcendent serenity. “Kill for love, and make it so I don't care,” sings Foo, with none of the prior swagger. “Lucifer” implies a confrontation with the darker consequences of love. The lyric “Lucifer, here she comes now/Knife in hand, here she comes now” carries the fatigue of demonically possessed inevitability. “I tend to harden up when our love is set to go/I wanna give it up for someone I don't know” Foo refrains on “Dissonant,” capturing the album’s pathology that human connection never arrives in the ideal form, and that longing itself produces the schism it seeks to close.

The album invites other musical ghosts, like Grouper’s Ruins, MBV’s m b v, even the glossier entropy of Beach House’s 7, but its most compelling resonance may be cinematic. Listening to Pe’ahi II recalls the apparitions of Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Cemetery of Splendour, in which time folds back on itself and memory becomes ambient atmosphere. Like Weerasethakul’s sleeping soldiers, The Raveonettes drift in a half-conscious state. Their voices, once sharply contrasted in Pe’ahi, now blur. They never wake up, nor actually die. They just echo faintly with histories no longer entirely their own. Thus, the surf motif, long a Raveonettes staple, now feels like a metaphor for cyclical, tidal time in which nothing is ever conclusively past.

Pe’ahi II dares to be emotionally ambiguous in a cultural moment addicted to catharsis, leaving listeners with a rare resonance. Foo and Wagner are offering emotional, sonic, and psychic continuity. It’s the sound of two artists experienced enough to know that memory is something you never overcome, only inhabit. In its final moments, the album just blurs, like the horizon line from a drowning perspective. And then the sea takes it, again.