Beauty Pill

Chad Clark—the founder and mastermind of the lush and restless indie rock band Beauty Pill—is a musical survivor. When he was still a Washington high school student, Clark started the knotty and strange Smart Went Crazy, issuing two LPs through the D.C. documentarians of Dischord. A few years after that band’s end, several members launched Beauty Pill, a group that linked the moody arpeggios and unexpected chord structures of emo with the restraint and balance of indie rock. But as smart and well-crafted as it was, their 2004 debut, The Unsustainable Lifestyle, never reached the tipping point of broad appeal that many of their contemporaries did. And then, in 2007, a viral infection hit Clark’s heart, requiring a replacement with a mechanical heart. “It’s hard to deny that when your heart isn’t working, it kind of affects everything,” Clark told Talkhouse decades later.

But Clark and Beauty Pill got back to work, beginning sessions for 2015’s incredible Beauty Pill Describes Things As They Are in public in an art museum, an installation about making new work. With their ingenious use of electronics, plunging sense of dynamics, and sophisticated rhythmic interplay, those dozen songs helped to reimagine what indie rock could encompass while never forsaking a magnetic sense of melody. Pitchfork was one of many outlets to rave about it, calling it “a smorgasbord of angles, melodies, loops, pockets, and fractal surfaces that nonetheless refuse to deviate from Clark’s longstanding bailiwick: the mythic power of the pop hook.” In the dozen years since, Beauty Pill has gone on multiple unexpected adventures, from the glitchy or cinematic electronic pieces of 2020’s Sorry You’re Here to an EP recorded on a roof. And Clark, in 2023, got a new heart. Beauty Pill shows out of town have been rare, given all the extenuating circumstances; Big Ears is delighted to welcome this D.C. treasure to Tennessee.