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The Lonely Island just dropped a Beyoncé-style visual album on Netflix

The Unauthorized Bash Brothers Experience is a surreal Lemonade send-up

lonely island bash brothers visual album on netflix
Akiva Schaffer and Andy Samberg in The Unauthorized Bash Brothers Experience.
Netflix
Matt Patches is an executive editor at Polygon. He has over 15 years of experience reporting on movies and TV, and reviewing pop culture.

Brace for the unfiltered oddity that is The Unauthorized Bash Brothers Experience.

Through their meteoric rise on Saturday Night Live to Andy Samberg’s breakout fame in movies and Brooklyn Nine-Nine to their bigger-budget stabs at comedy glory (Hot Rod, Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping), the Lonely Island comedy troupe has remained themselves, the goofballs who wrote The ’Bu for Channel 101 and thought biting into heads of lettuce was hilarious (it was).

Samberg, Akiva Schaffer, and Jorma Taccone have gone their separate ways over the years — Taccone directed MacGruber while Schaffer helmed the all-star comedy The Watch — but they constantly reunite, whether it’s to go on tour as Lonely Island or to use their viral fame to launch other series (the group recently produced the greatest sketch show in recent memory, I Think You Should Leave with Tim Robinson).

The Lonely Island’s latest joint comes out of nowhere: a spoof of Beyoncé’s Lemonade, complete with a surprise Thursday drop on Netflix, focused on Jose Canseco and Mark McGwire’s notorious 1980s home run streak. Of course!

The Unauthorized Bash Brothers Experience opens with an explanatory title card that will not help any bystander understand what Samberg and Schaffer, who star in the 30-minute video.

The Unauthorized Bash Brothers Experience Netflix

A music video compilation in line with their recent HBO sports spoofs Tour de Pharmacy and 7 Days in Hell (co-starring Kit Harington!), The Unauthorized Bash Brothers Experience explores the shared psyche of Canseco and McGwire through poetry, abstract imagery, and profane lyrics. Haim, Maya Rudolph, Hannah Simone, Jenny Slate, Jim O’Heir and Sterling K Brown — as Sia — also appear.

Samberg and Schaffer don’t skimp on the darkness of the Bash Brothers. With lyrics like “Stab that needle in my ass until I am rich / Make me a god with the chemical sciences,” the Unauthorized Bash Brothers Experience eventually finds McGwire begging a vision of his father to save his life, as Canseco raps about how therapy is for the weak.

To reiterate: The Lonely Island has always remained themselves.

You can watch the full Unauthorized Bash Brothers Experience on Netflix right now. The Lonely Island also released an album of the songs to Spotify so you can keep the muscle-pumping nightmares alive when you’re not in front of a screen.

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