She’ll make you beg and plead
Make you dance to the gunshots
She whispered me a threat I won’t soon forget
Some people leave a relationship with memories; others leave it looking like evidence. In “Threats (If I Can’t Break Your Heart),” love has curdled into leverage, and the woman at its center treats affection as another surface to damage. She does not plead for devotion. She promises consequences.
Chicago’s BELLHEAD injects life into those consequences and revisits the scene of the crime in their video for “Threats (If I Can’t Break Your Heart),” directed by John Weaver. The striking new visual accompanies an expanded yellow-vinyl edition of Threats EP and a series of late-summer and early-fall tour dates.
Built from two basses and a drum machine, “Threats” prowls before it pounces. Karen Righeimer-Schock supplies the low-end pressure, dragging the song forward with a bassline that feels heavy enough to disturb the furniture, while Ivan Russia works the instrument’s upper register into serrated, almost guitar-shaped lines. The programmed rhythm advances from a measured trudge into an industrial stomp, leaving the arrangement plenty of empty space in which each scrape, throb, and breath can register.
Russia delivers the verses with a conspiratorial growl, recounting the exploits of a woman drawn to wreckage, revenge, violence, and the intoxicating moment before everything gives way. When the chorus arrives, that private warning becomes a communal chant. Righeimer-Schock’s voice later slips through the arrangement with chilling composure, embodying the song’s central figure rather than merely describing her.
She is less a conventional villain than a force that has learned to turn old damage outward. A corrupted nursery rhyme suggests she was shattered long before she began breaking other people, but the song offers no easy absolution. Hurt has hardened into appetite; intimacy has become another instrument of control. Recorded and mixed by Neil Strauch and mastered by Carl Saff, the track turns that cycle into something muscular, theatrical, and gleefully menacing.
Weaver’s video opens as though the viewer has arrived after the struggle. Plastic sheeting catches the cold light, evidence tags hang from covered forms, and numbered markers sit among overturned lamps and scattered debris. The room resembles a half-cleared crime scene, but BELLHEAD are already inside it, dressed in funeral black and performing as though nothing unusual has happened.
Righeimer-Schock stands behind an upright bass while Russia crouches at the front of the room, gripping a microphone as its cable coils around him. His gestures move between interrogation, confession, and accusation. Behind them, mannequin-like figures remain wrapped in translucent plastic, silent witnesses to whatever occurred before the camera arrived.
These claustrophobic scenes are interrupted by footage of the band performing beneath hard stage lights and heavy haze (joined by an unseen Wes Hayden and Kevin Epperson). The broader stage setup gives the chorus a larger physical impact, but the silhouettes and severe backlighting preserve the video’s atmosphere of concealment.
Elsewhere, Russia and Righeimer-Schock appear alone in a barren winter field. He advances toward the lens in dark glasses and a long black coat; she addresses it in a veiled hat, fur, and gloves, her hands raised as though delivering either a warning or a sentence. Stripped of the room’s props and plastic-covered bodies, these direct-to-camera passages make the threat feel suddenly personal.
By the final shot, bands of crime-scene tape have sealed off the entire room, leaving the musicians visible behind the warning. Whether they are victims, witnesses, suspects, or the people responsible is left unresolved. The only certainty is that the damage has already been done.
Watch the video for Threats (If I Can’t Break Your Heart) below:
Bellhead’s new video accompanies the expanded edition of Threats, now available as a limited 12-inch yellow-vinyl pressing. The ten-track edition places the record’s five original songs on Side A, while Side B is devoted to reinterpretations from BELLHEAD and several figures from the industrial and dark alternative underground.
Christopher Hall of Stabbing Westward contributes a club-driven mix of “Bad Taste” featuring his own vocals, while Walter Flakus revisits BELLHEAD’s 2022 track “Nothing As It Seems.” Clubdrugs dismantle and reconstruct “Heart Shaped Hole,” Frontal Boundary reshape “Shutters + Stutters,” and BELLHEAD return to the closing track from 2023’s Good Intentions with a new version of “Drugstore Keri.”
Threats is out now on expanded yellow vinyl. Order the album here.
BELLHEAD will carry the record back onto the road beginning July 31 in South Bend. The run moves through the Midwest, Great Plains, Southwest, Gulf Coast, and South, with appearances alongside Iron Years, Thief, Livernois, PIG, and Cyanotic, among others.
BELLHEAD Tour Dates:
July 31 — LangLab, South Bend, IN
August 2 — The Burlington, Chicago, IL — with Iron Years, Most Modern, and In a Darkened Room
August 28 — Cactus Club, Milwaukee, WI
September 1 — Coven, Omaha, NE
September 2 — Kirby’s Beer Store, Wichita, KS
September 3 — The Crypt, Denver, CO — with EhPh and Hypersomnia
September 4 — Launchpad, Albuquerque, NM — New Mexico Goth Fest with Thief
September 5 — Resonant Head, Oklahoma City, OK — with Mechanical Flesh, Blood Bells, Othering, and Later Laine
September 6 — Kickback Bar, Houston, TX
September 7 — The Crypt, New Orleans, LA — with Livernois
September 17 — Rose Bowl Tavern, Urbana, IL — Bat Factory
September 18 — Hi Tone, Memphis, TN
September 19 — Birdie’s Cabaret Theater and Lounge, Little Rock, AR — with PIG and Cyanotic
September 20 — Fubar, St. Louis, MO — with Spicy Kitty and Bitchface
Follow BELLHEAD:
Website
Bandcamp
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Spotify
The post “Bad Girls Take What They Want” — Chicago Duo Bellhead Revisit the Scene of the Crime in Video for “Threats” appeared first on Post-Punk.com.
