Bethany Cosentino laughs when she says it now, but keeping her debut solo album a secret nearly broke her. “I didn’t tell anyone,” she says. “I wanted to make this record without any external pressure. To just be invisible for a while.” Which sounds funny coming from someone who, whether she’ll admit it or not, helped define an entire era of indie rock. “Haley Williams told me, ‘You’re literally an icon—you created a whole sound,’” she says. “And I was like, okay, maybe if Haley Williams says it…”
Cosentino’s Natural Disaster is what happens when the girl from Best Coast grows up, trades the haze for clarity, and learns that peace isn’t boring—it’s radical. “I started feeling like I’d outgrown myself,” she says. “I didn’t feel like that person anymore, and I needed to figure out who I was now.”
The pandemic forced the reckoning. Best Coast’s Always Tomorrow had barely hit shelves before the world shut down, and suddenly, the singer who once ruled Tumblr with Cali sunshine and heartbreak pop found herself alone with her thoughts. “We kept trying to tour, do livestreams, all that,” she says. “But it just felt like the universe was saying, ‘You’re supposed to be doing something else.’”
What she ended up doing was shedding a decade’s worth of persona. The girl who used to sing about messy breakups and hangovers became the woman who writes about balance, climate anxiety, and the rare joy of stability. “There’s that line, ‘Imagine if I handled this shit like I used to,’” she says. “That’s me acknowledging how much I’ve changed. I saw something online that pissed me off and my first instinct was to go off—but then I thought, no. Thirty-five-year-old me doesn’t need to do that. She’ll write a song instead.”
The new album is full of those moments—clarity through self-awareness, growth through restraint. Songs like “Easy” ditch the chaos of her 20s for something sturdier. “My relationships back then were all drama and adrenaline,” she says. “They felt hard because they weren’t real. This one’s real, and that’s why it’s easy—even when it’s not.” She laughs, then adds, “That’s what we all deserve. Someone who makes it easy even when it isn’t.”
It’s not just the subject matter that’s changed. Natural Disaster sounds like it could’ve slipped into rotation between Sheryl Crow and Counting Crows on mid-’90s radio—and Cosentino’s fine with that. “That was the music I grew up on,” she says. “I wanted to make the kind of record my nine-year-old self would’ve heard in the car and said, ‘Turn this up.’” She grins. “When I told Butch Walker that, he was like, ‘I’ve been waiting my whole life to make this record.’”
That influence—R.E.M., The Wallflowers, Liz Phair, Sheryl Crow—isn’t nostalgia; it’s craftsmanship. “Back then, people weren’t trying to write hits,” she says. “They were just writing what felt true. And it just so happened those songs ruled the radio.”
She talks about making music like she talks about journaling—rituals of clarity. Shirley Manson once DM’d her to stop talking shit about herself. “She told me, ‘Your words have power. Stop saying that stuff or your Scottish mummy will be very cross,’” Cosentino says, laughing. “I printed it out and hung it next to my desk.”
The older she gets, the more she leans on her heroes—women who’ve survived the industry’s ugliest decades and still sound unbothered. “They lived through the most misogynistic era imaginable,” she says. “And they’re still here. It’s like, okay, I can do this too.”
When she plays live now, it’s all about the reset. “If I play Best Coast songs, I’ll do them solo, stripped down,” she says. “Bob [Bruno] is family, and that band was ours. It wouldn’t feel right to recreate it without him.”
Even the apocalypse can’t shake her. The album’s title track turns climate dread into something you can dance to. “It’s about how we just go on with our lives while the world burns behind us,” she says. “We’ll freak out about celebrity gossip but not about the planet literally dying. It’s insane—but I wanted to write it in a way people could still move to. Like, maybe you’ll be dancing and then realize, ‘Oh, this is actually about the end of civilization.’”
She laughs again. “I like happy songs with intense lyrics. That’s my favorite trick.”
Maybe that’s why she’s lasted this long: every song, even the dark ones, ends with a bit of light. “Yeah, everything’s scary,” she says. “But there’s also so much magic if you let yourself see it.”
And if her premonitions ever start coming true—well, she hopes the next one’s a good one. “Maybe one day I’ll wake up and all the horrible conservatives will get blasted into space,” she says, grinning. “That’d be a nice change of pace.”
Watch the interview above and then check out the video below.
