Four years ago, in a vastly different context, Cafuné—the indie-pop powerhouse of Noah Yoo and Sedona Schat—released Running, a bionic debut album that soundtracked a collective urge for post-pandemic escapism. That record, Schat says, “is literally all about running away.” But as the duo enters its tenth year, their foundational questions—of authenticity, artificiality, and the existential tension between the two—feel more pressing than ever. “The entire time that the band has existed,” Schat says, “it’s always been about negotiating between digital manipulation and raw realness.”

This moment—one increasingly defined by AI, algorithms, and artificial intimacy—is very much a bastion of “digital manipulation” in itself. Recorded in 2024, their new record finds the band at a familiar crossroads, reckoning between real and fake. The difference, this time around, is that they’re doing it in the real world, too. And it sounds like it. Bite Reality captures Cafuné in a confrontational state, no longer running from the bite of reality, but biting reality back. Their guitars growl; their vocals snarl; their lyrics teem with brutal honesty, not avoidant analogy. “Self-flagellation is not cute after a certain point,” Yoo says, with a laugh. “That’s not even helpful,” Schat adds. “What helps you to be better is actually facing: What is really wrong, and how do I work through it?”

Bite Reality is about the fine line between documenting your existence and doing the work to actually exist. What does humanity look, sound, and feel like in a dehumanizing era? Why prove that you’re alive when you can just live?