Teenage Sequence releases acid-tongued, self-titled debut album via Everything Sucks Music
Including new single / focus track ‘I Can’:
Teenage Sequence has released his much-anticipated, self-titled debut album today via Everything Sucks Music (UK/EU) and Get Better Records (US). A collection of insatiable singles has led into the release. ‘Tell Me Your Name’, ‘D.I.S Connect’, ‘All This Art’ and ‘The City Is Hungover’ have enjoyed support on the likes of BBC Radio 1, BBC Radio 6 Music, Radio X - Playlist, KEXP and Amazing Radio. The album features new single ‘I Can’ which is introduced by an unhinged synth slide and intense percussive drive in amongst British Asian songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Dewan-Dean Soomary’s mantra-like vocal. He says "I wrote 'I Can' at probably the lowest point of my adult life. For the first time in a long time I found myself in a space that was totally dark and seemingly never ending. I had to create my own light and the only way I could think of doing it was to write a song; and I think it is important to point out that despite what I say in the chorus, that I can fix everyone including myself, the truth is, of course, I can't nor can anyone else. It is simply a somewhat naive mantra that I needed to repeat in order to get better and my hope is that if someone else finds themselves in that situation, they too can find something to hold on to."
Teenage Sequence is Soomary telling acid-tongued and relatable stories about the humiliations and alienations of modern life. Recent single ‘Tell Me Your Name’ blends the snappy pop sensibility of indie discos with the savage social commentary of post-punk. Imagine the scene. A group of black and brown teenage boys wait in line for a club, surrounded by beautiful art school dropouts in “tiny jackets and borrowed nostalgia” high on cheap cocaine and cheaper vodka — the average Saturday night scene in 2007 London. Behind the club doors are all their hopes and dreams: love, sex, rock’n’roll, and the fantasy that one day it’ll be their music that will pour out of the PA over the leather-clad, shoulder-dancing masses below. But as they approach those doors, the smile of the Jarvis Cocker clone playing gatekeeper begins to turn sinister — just for them — and they know why. The power has shifted. They know the truth before it’s spoken: “Not tonight, boys... we got enough of your type already.”
‘Tell Me Your Name’ is the based-on-real-life story of an event that serves as a microcosm of Soomary’s experiences in the music industry and the bleak realities that come with being an artist of colour. Soomary says “On ‘Tell Me Your Name’ I wanted to create a pastiche of a pastiche and leaned heavily into sounds and arpeggiators that one might find on a mid 2000s indie-disco record that itself was trying to replicate that post-disco pre-dance late 1970s sound. I wanted to create something familiar, comfortable, and then juxtapose this really bleak story against, I tried to create something that upon further listens becomes quite uncomfortable -because to me that is what 90% of racism is, every day normal events having the potential to turn into something uncomfortable due to someone else’s prejudice and us being powerless to do anything about it. Like, I have experienced more visceral and violent forms of racism, that goes without saying, but for some reason it's stuff like not getting into a club for no other reason than skin colour that stays with me the most. I really hope that this song does the other people who were with me justice. I personally think it’s the best song I’ve ever written, but really in this my opinion doesn’t matter.”
'Teenage Sequence' was primarily recorded in Soomary’s flat in Bethnal Green, East London, where he turned decades’ worth of experience in the music industry into catty, cutting, and timely musical insights. These ideas were then taken into Savage Sound Studios, where co-producer Kevin Vanbergen, drummer James Gulliver, and Soomary’s now-wife Kristin Ferebee (formerly of indie-folk group Beirut) added their talents to the final album.
The album takes you on a musical journey through some of music’s more shadowy intersections, with proto-house, acid, krautrock, UK garage, post punk, disco, and pop. The stories Teenage Sequence tells are the casual racism of a date gone wrong and of the music industry, the endless series of hangovers that keep you stuck as an eternal kid, the despair of living in a world on the verge of destruction, the yearning when you fall in love despite all of this. Self-aware, with a dark humour, Soomary’s lyrics are drenched in socio-political overtones — although in his view that is a byproduct of who he is rather than a deliberate statement. “I come from a background in explicitly political bands who used music as a platform for political standpoints. Teenage Sequence isn’t that; I simply write about my life, the world as I understand it and as I’ve experienced it. If that then becomes a social or political statement — and I know it does — then it is because my existence is a social or political statement.”
Soomary calls Texas home these days, but he’s a Londoner to his core, and it shows on his record. This debut album is soaked and grounded in the stuff of London: lush synthesisers, fuzzy guitars, and relentless 909 beats that build a soundscape as sleek, pulsing, merciless, and ultimately as irresistible as London itself. It’s a sonic burst straight from a city prone to spectacular and stylish disintegrations, one that demands that the listener dance even as it reminds them that the dance-floor is burning.
LIVE DATES:
29 Sept Dream Bags Jaguar Shoes, London
03 Oct Polar Bear Club, Hull
04 Oct Banquet Records, Kingston (in-store)
10-11 May Dead Punk Special, Bristol
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