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Teenage Kicks Spoil The Youth With Their Debut Album

It's hard enough to make a debut album you're proud of, but this Hamilton rock band had to do it twice.

The coming of Teenage Kicks’ debut album, Spoils of Youth, arrives with both excitement and remorse for frontman Peter van Helvoort. While he and brother Jeff van Helvoort have been playing in bands together for over a decade, their story is one overwrought with setbacks. While the pair have produced a 7-inch Shook Our Bones and two EP’s, Rational Anthems and Be On My Side, the latter of which was released on EMI in 2012, they have also braved a revolving cast of band members, countless personal and financial obstacles as well as the nightmare of having to make their debut album, twice.

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The good news is that Spoils of Youth, which will finally be made available via Rezolute Music on April 29th, is fantastic. It’s rich with songs that occupy the kind of honesty, integrity and absolute truth that tends to surface only after we’ve come so glaringly close to defeat that we finally decide to answer to our ourselves. In a time when there has never been more rock and roll to choose from, it has become increasingly difficult for even the most tirelessly committed artists to preserver. With that said, Spoils of Youth is exactly what it claims to be; the point at which all of this band’s hopes and dreams, those that they have feverishly sought out with total conviction since adolescence, finally calumniate for better or worse.

Fairly certain that rock is a dead medium, Peter seems ready for one last hooray. We spoke to him about whether of not he’s proud of the record his band has made, and the struggle that they went through to make it.

Noisey: You and your brother Jeff have been playing in bands together for over 10 years now, but this month you are finally releasing your debut album as Teenage Kicks, Spoils of Youth. This album was clearly a long time in the making so where are you guys at in terms of headspace finally coming up upon this release?
Teenage Kicks: I’m nervous. Very nervous. I just got the test presses right before you called and the record comes out in less than a week [laughs]. I don’t know, I’m excited, I’m happy and I’m proud of it, but I’ve always been nervous about what people are going to think. I wish I could just be resolved of it and not care what other people think but the reality is when you do something twice and make two recordings of an album within the same year, there’s just a lot of pressure riding on this. We’ve fired a lot of people and been fired by a lot of people–we’ve just pissed a lot of people off [laughs].

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You mentioned making the album twice. Last year around this time you guys actually announced that you would be going to West Hollywood to record what was supposed to be your debut with Alain Johannes. Upon arriving back home, you actually decided to shelve that project and re-record and produce the record yourself. What was it about the first experience that just wasn’t sitting right with you guys and what brought on that change of heart after the fact?
It was sonics. It was a weird experience in general because Alain had gone through some personal stuff and I don’t think we should have been able to go there and record. We were sort of warned ahead of time that he might not be the right guy because producing is not necessarily what he does, he’s always been more of an engineer. His late wife Natasha Shneider who he used to play in Queens of The Stone Age with and produced the Chris Cornell record with and who are both infinitely talented, she kind of handled more of the songwriting side of things.

We had conversations before we went to California where our record label was like, "listen, if you’re not doing preproduction with the band then you’re not doing the record." He said, "don’t worry I will," so we went down to California but it never happened. Literally day one we got off the plane and went and recorded “Houdini” I think it was. We just went right in and did it, we didn’t talk about it, and that was it. That became the theme for the whole thing. Within the first week I had a feeling that this was maybe not the best situation. Unfortunately, just to get down there it cost us $20,000. Between studio costs, the house we rented for the month, our flights and our P2’s, I thought: ‘fuck, if we have to make this record again we’re not going to be able to get another big guy,’ which was what the label was really pushing for. They felt we needed to have a name behind us and he is a great engineer so we said, ‘okay, he’ll figure it out.’

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So the band sensed that things were going south early on in the process?
Yeah, we had all kinds of fears while we were recording and listening back to it. We would take the songs and listen to them in our rental car or back at the place where we were staying and say, ‘this isn’t good.’ Even other people from the label were like ‘this is really bad,’ and we’d bring it up and say "everyone says this is sounding bad," and he’d say "they don’t know that they are talking about." Being naive and having recorded ourselves for such a long time, we kind of thought there was going to be this extra step, we were going to get home and it was going to be magic and everything was going to sound amazing. When we did get home I had this "oh shit" moment. I put it on my monitors where I do all of my recording, and realized it really was terrible.

What the hell do you do at that point?
Well, at that point we brought it to a couple of people to try and re-mix but the mixes they sent were bad too. Everyone kept saying "there isn’t really a whole lot to work with here," so I pretty much told the label "if you keep sending the songs around to be mixed by people, the band is going to break up. You just need to let us make the record again." They gave me 8 hours in the studio to do one song so we recorded it, it got mixed and everyone kind of said, "well, that sound a hundred times better," so we did the whole thing. We did drums a bass at a real studio and everything else we did at our house.

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Can you tell me a bit about what it was like to make this debut record a second time?
I’m particularly pessimistic so for me to get myself out of that headspace and make the record again was tough. The process of actually making the record the second time was pretty terrible too. Everything that could go wrong did. On the last day we were in the studio doing bass and drums, Drake was making his record Nothing Was The Same, in the studio next to us. We were there during the daytime but they were going to come in at night and were specifically told not to touch anything. For whatever reason on that last night, they just came in and hit nobs and turned switches on and off, so we came in to that and had to try and recall everything in the studio to cell phone photos. Then there was that flood that happened in Toronto and Metalworks, the studio we were in, literally flooded while I was in the middle of tracking something. By the time we finally finished it, Keegan quit and then a month later Cam quit. A continuing thing in the history of our band has been getting to that next step that never actually happens. It’s been a lot of one step forward and two steps back, just when we think we’re moving ahead.

I want to talk a bit about the lyrical content on this album. Do you find that songwriting comes naturally to you, or is that something you have cultivated over time?
I haven’t felt confident in my lyrics in a long time. I think Jeff is a way better lyricist and none of his songs are on this record. I have a really hard time with “blanket statement” kind of songs. For instance “Life, Death, & A Little Bit of Self-Respect,” that song was written right after Jeff and Pat quit, which was right when all kinds of stuff was sort of happening for the band, and they bailed. I remember feeling like: "oh my god, I don’t want to be in a band, I don’t want to do this anymore," but someone I trust told me to just take it and write a song about it. I’m the kind of person that, when I’m sad, I don’t want to do stuff, I want to lie around and do nothing, it doesn’t inspire me. It’s almost like apathy inspires me, you know like not being sad but not having the will to change something? Anyways, I wrote that song and now when I hear it or sing the lyrics I just think, "god I hate these, they are so cheesy," but that’s the one song that for whatever reason people have been like, "hell yeah, that’s how I feel" or "that speaks to me," and I guess that’s it.

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Do you have any great independent Canadian bands that you listen to?
I like Sonic Avenues from Montreal — they are really good. Also TV FREAKS from Hamilton. They’re just really good songwriters and really good live. Catchy, aggressive, and the songs are really forward. There are so many good bands out there but I’ll say those two.

So, Spoils of Youth comes out on April 29th. What does the finished product say about Teenage Kicks the band right now in 2014?
I don’t know. When I listen to it I think it wasn’t made for these times. I think it’s a pretty all-encompassing rock record. It’s very developed but it’s as natural as it is produced, and it definitely represents all the records I loved when I was a kid. Plus, we did it ourselves. I think it’s the ultimate example of what you can accomplish if you don’t give up but in the same respect I have nothing but feelings of total remorse in that this is going to be the end of the road. Not in the sense that I feel sorry for myself, I just don’t think anyone’s asking for it, you know what I mean? Rock is a dead medium. Maybe someone will hear this record and say, ‘fuck I want to be in a rock band,’ and that kid will become successful, but as far as I’m concerned, it’s the end of the road for me and I’m okay with that.

I needed to make a record I was proud of and we did––I’ve never been proud of anything we’ve ever done. I’m still going to continue to play music, I’ll continue to grow, but I’ve accepted the fact that it’s time for me to go and do something else. I wish I could say that sticks and stones will break my bones but names will never hurt me, but I’m sure I’ll still get pretty butthurt about some reviews [laughs]. If we become successful and something happens then that’s amazing and I’ll take it as it comes, but I’ve literally ruined my life waiting and hoping. I’ll sit and check my phone for good news about the band fifty times a day––it’s obsessive and not healthy, you know? If people love it great. If they don’t, who gives a fuck? I needed to be able to say that.

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Juliette Jagger is a rock n' roll writer living in Toronto. She's on Twitter.

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