Their first 'proper' studio album arrives this week via Run For Cover.
Teen Suicide have released 'Suffering (Mike's Way)', a jangly indie punk track featuring bubbling keyboards and prominent hooks. The song serves as the latest preview of 'Nude descending staircase headless', their new album arriving on 17th April through Run For Cover Records.
The record marks a significant departure for the band, being their first album made in a professional studio environment. Mike Sapone (Taking Back Sunday, Oso Oso, Cymbals Eat Guitars) handled production duties, and two previous singles — 'Idiot' and 'Spiders' — had already given listeners a taste of what to expect.
Sam Ray, the band's guitarist and vocalist, traced the origins of the new track back several years: "'Suffering (Mike's Way)' was one of the first songs we started writing for this new record. I started working on it in 2022, not long after we started performing live again. I wanted to write something with the same propulsive energy of The Feelies, The Thermals, Wire. Jonathan Richman. That was our jumping off point, and it just sort of evolved from there. The song earned its parenthetical because Mike (Sapone, our producer) was adamant we amend the vocal melody in the chorus by a single note, and though I fought him on it at first, we tried it both ways and he was undoubtedly correct. Lyrically, it's harder to pinpoint – despite the name, I consider it one of our more optimistic songs. It's a sort of love song. It's a song about the world. About living life. About getting clean from opiates. How much better it is to feel everything than nothing. It's really just a song about movement – forward momentum. All the times you think you can't go on and then you just do, somehow, and suddenly you're looking back at it all. And even then, you're still moving."
Moving into a proper studio represented a conscious evolution for the husband-and-wife-led project. Kitty Ray spoke about that shift in mindset: "I don't want to just be some forgotten fixture of the internet. I started to realize if we took ourselves more seriously other people might take us more seriously too."
Sam elaborated on overcoming his own hesitations: "A lot of my reluctance to do that, and even some of my past lashing out, was just out of fear, like 'what would happen if I really tried to do this?'. But I started asking myself what I was hiding from, even in terms of the songwriting–why take a really good song and bury it? Also from playing more shows again we started thinking about making songs that would be fun to perform and fun for an audience to see. It just began to feel natural to approach things a different way."
Previously, all of the band's output had been created under very different circumstances. As Sam put it: "On the older records everything was self-recorded, home-recorded, on a laptop or on tape, and always with really limited resources. I think we became known for that but it was also very limiting to be seen as a lo-fi band."
Returning to live performance after health struggles — Sam recovered from a rare lung disease while Kitty learned to manage a chronic illness — brought renewed energy and a growing audience. "When we played our first show in a long time it was wild to come back to a bigger audience," Sam said, "but it also made us realize it would be a waste to not try and do something with that. Bands are making so much music that sounds like it could be generated by a computer now–I think people want something different even if they don't realize it."
Rather than viewing the album as a radical reinvention, Sam framed it as a natural progression: "This isn't a big swing to do something new and see if it works. It's just that so much has changed for us as a band and as people, and it makes this record kind of the start of a new thing."
Lyrically, the thirteen-track record grapples with weighty subjects including nihilism, addiction, and the challenge of creating meaningful art. Sam drew a literary parallel: "The album title comes from a David Berman poem, and I always go back to Silver Jews with how he was able to intertwine stories from his real life into a much bigger world."
Kitty offered her own perspective on what fuels the writing: "I think to write this kind of music you sort of have to pull from torment. Our torment is more external. This is what we do, the only thing we know is making music, so the existential perils of these ever-changing machines and systems we're trying to exist within is the stuff that's driving us insane when we sit down to write a song."
She also spoke about the power of communal experience at live shows: "If you can get everyone singing the same words at a show, these words have power. And if you can get those people singing something real–that's the goal."
Alongside the album, Teen Suicide have confirmed a North American tour with Cloud Nothings, Liquid Mike, University, and Pure Hex among the support acts.
We've got Shame, Keo, Julia Cumming and Adult DVD.
