Lo-fi surf from the Norwich lads doin’ it for themselves

Teen Brains riding high
By Alex James Taylor | Music | 18 August 2014

Lowestoft based Teen Brains are fresh meat, in the rawest sense. Search their name and find a sparse Bandcamp page featuring the single song, debut Annabel. Having only formed in April this year they are still to lose their gig virginity, yet they’ve already caught our attention as purveyors of a melodic, washed-out surf vibe.

Adding to the comprehensive list ‘songs titled by girl’s names’, Annabel is the age old tale of ‘boy pines after girl, boy writes song about girl, boy hopes girl likes boys in bands’. The track buzzes lazily with youthful zest and baggy adolescent dreaming – ‘I wanna see things I’ve never seen/Oh Annabel, why can’t you be mine?’, singer Tyler Darrington croons like a modern Romeo. Production sounding like it was recorded from beneath a duvet (considering their bedroom studio this can’t be too far from the truth) evokes summer highs under a warmth of fuzzy charm and ethereal backing vocals.

A lolloping drumbeat urges their sound forward below twanged guitar (courtesy of guitarist Jack Palfrey, borrowed from The Cure), injecting further young romanticism in droves. Here is the perfect balance in dynamic, thoughtfully constructed yet loose, mature yet lo-fi, a brilliantly shoegaze influenced blast from the past created by two lads who weren’t even born when The Jesus and Mary Chain’s Psychocandy first hit the shelves.

Seeing a near non-existent music scene in their hometown motivated them to take the reigns, not willing to wait around for doors to open, Tyler and Jack took matters into their own hands via a DIY philosophy, employed both through necessity and influence. These grassroots beginnings establish a carpe diem attitude and a flourishing creativity, recording their own songs, creating their own artwork and producing their own videos. At just seventeen years old the potential is impressive, the determination instilled and the ability innate. Watch this space.

Alex James Taylor: So when did you first get together? 
Jack Palfrey: Well Teen Brains has only been a thing since like April, so not very long. We both really wanted to do something like this for a while and we’d mentioned it before, then one day we just decided to actually give it a go. So I recorded some ideas on guitar and sent them over to Tyler, then we met up and put some lyrics and stuff over the top and we were really into how it sounded. We started recording that night and the track ended up being Annabel, it all happened pretty quick.

AT: Wow, so you’re only like five months old as a band, have you even performed live yet?
JP: No, we haven’t actually gigged yet. We’ve been so focused on writing and recording that we’ve only just got round to practicing live – it’s impossible to recreate our music live with just the two of us cause there’s loads of little bits, so we have a ‘band’ which is a couple of really good friends of ours, Harley and Jesse, it sounds really cool already. Because me and Tyler will write something and then record it straight away we never really get the chance to hear our music ‘properly’, in real life, so it’s been really cool to hear our songs as an actual thing. We’re all dying to start playing shows so hopefully it won’t be too long until we’re making noise all over the place.

AT: What were you both doing before Teen Brains? 
JP: Before Teen Brains we both played in another band called Important Things, that was like 90s emo – totally different to this, but it was fun. Tyler played in this band called Chains too, that was like mellow, ambient indie stuff. I ran a little DIY tape label called Weathered Collective and I put on shows in norwich. To be honest, aside from music-related stuff we don’t really do a lot, does that make us boring?

AT: What made you settle on the moniker Teen Brains?
JP: Truthfully, it was mainly a case of stitching words together until we got something that sounded really cool and we actually agreed on [laughing]. But thinking into it, it does kinda work with our music – when writing we don’t wanna try and be all mature and polished, we want this sort of exuberance where people could have fun and mess about listening to us so i think Teen Brains works with that.

AT: There’s a strong surf vibe to your sound, do you think living by the sea influenced this?
JP: Living by the beach definitely plays a part in our lyrics, we like to sing about it a lot. There’s no music scene in the town we live in, unless you like boring metal bands and The Darkness, so in that sense there’s no music scene here which influences us. We live in a little seaside town outside of Norwich, living on the coast may have made us appreciate music with that surfer vibe a lot more, which may have then bled through into our writing.

AT: What music are you guys into?
JP: There’s a few bands that have definitely influenced us, when writing we were listening to a lot of stuff like The Cure, Splashh, Beach Fossils, Wild Nothing, that sorta thing and I think that particularly shines through on some parts. I’d been religiously listening to a load of shoegaze and I’d definitely say that’s noticeable in the fuzzy, noisy parts of the record.

AT: Is ‘Annabel’ an accurate representation of your sound?
JP: We’ve experimented quite a lot with this EP. No one song sounds the same, at some points it sounds similar to Annabel, with big surf pop vibes but then at others it just gets really fuzzy and noisy. Sometimes it feels psychadelic, and other times it feels really dreamy. We didn’t really want to limit ourselves to one sound so early on but throughout the EP there’s still this feel good, summery atmosphere like there is in Annabel.

AT: Your video for ‘Annabel’ is pretty retro, all done on VHS, did you make it yourselves?
JP: No a friend of ours made it, he’s really great at all that stuff. We basically had the idea of combining loads of old VHS footage from around America so we just told him what we wanted and he created this really cool video for us. I love the aesthetic of VHS, I honestly think you could shoot anything on an old, analog camera and it’d look great. Like everyone is shooting on film camera’s again so why not VHS? We’re definitely not the first but yeah, more people should definitely use it.

AT: After seeing pictures on Twitter of you both in a makeshift studio at home I’m assuming you record your own music, have you had any training in this?
JP: Yeah, we record it all ourselves – usually in a kitchen/bedroom/living room or something. That’s Tyler’s forté, he’s really into all of that, he’s been recording and producing for quite a while so it’s super helpful because we’re way too poor to afford actual studio recording.

AT: When can we expect more releases from you? 
JP: Well we don’t have any dates set in stone but we’re going to be announcing all the details about our EP with a brand new single very soon. One of our favourite labels is putting out the EP so we’re really, really excited about that. The single we’re releasing soon was the second song we wrote and it’s one of our favourites, it’s short and sweet and we’re really excited to get that out.

Find Teen Brains on Facebook and Bandcamp

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