Score: 4/5
The up-and-coming project band Teen Men from Wilmington, Delaware, made its entrance into the music world with a promising, self-titled indie pop album.
The audio/visual group includes four members and originated in 2013,a result of frequent sessions started by guitarist/vocalist Nick Krill and keyboardist Albert Birney from The Spinto Band and guitarist/visual artist Joe Hobson. Keyboardist/visual artist Catharine Maloney joined later, and the collaboration became Teen Men, according to Paste Magazine.
“Teen Men” offers a pleasant balance of consistently chill chords with psychedelic overlays. The overall sound is easy-listening, but never boring. Experimental, but never jarring.
Once I discovered this treasure, it stayed on replay for hours. It’s smooth enough as a unit to stick around as background music and make any task seem a little less daunting. But it’s also the perfect level of pop with enough variation to bring any low key hangout from zero to 100 real quick. “Teen Men” is like that laidback friend who is comfortable with themself and always up for anything — it’s whatever you want it to be, whenever you need it to be.
The vigorous track “Adventure Kids” follows the album’s solid introduction track and doesn’t disappoint. “We might need to disappear, but we’ll leave a part of us here. There’s nothing we can lose that we won’t ever need again,” are some of the whimsical lyrics of uncertainty that set the listener on their own self-journey.
“The Sea, The Sea” transitions from that upbeat tone using deep, faintly mysterious synth sounds but grabs listeners and holds them there for the duration of the song, while the summer jam “It’s All Rushing Back” shows up afterward and drops you onto a beach in seconds with a thick island feel from start to finish.
“Teen Men” takes another turn to “René,” which starts off slow and melodic. The lyrics are freeing and work with the melodies to depict thoughts and feelings of life, putting down the past and moving forward from there.
The album continues on to do an excellent job of flowing this range of moods and holds a lot of potential as a debut. I’m interested to see how Teen Men progresses from here. The band is on a summer tour with Clap Your Hands Say Yeah. Although they’ll be skipping over Louisiana, anyone going on a road trip with no agenda should check those dates and look into an intentional detour.