Dazzled by TEEN: How the Band Escaped New York's Pressure to Go Their Way, All Day

Photos by Hannah Whitaker, courtesy of TEEN

It's Valentine's Day, and psych-pop band TEEN are hitting the stage at Brooklyn venue Union Pool in scarlet jumpsuits. But their four coordinated red outfits have nothing to do with V-Day; they're playing up the aesthetic of their new album, Love Yes, a circus of vibrant, synth-driven tunes—a departure from the softer, hazier sonic aesthetic of their first two albums as a group. The red symbolizes the passion, fear, pain and joy contained in their electronic bohemian rhapsodies.

"I like her shoes," someone comments next to me, and I look at lead singer Teeny Lieberson's footwear, which is socks and metallic sandals: nice. Her eyebrows are filled in with blue liner, her brown hair is in a straight bob, and she's wearing pants with an elastic waistband. She straps on her guitar, and they launch into Love Yes' s first track, "Toyko," a song about a married guy eyeing younger women. Teeny dominates the stage, using her voice not only as the strongest instrument of the group but as a vessel to call out bullshit misogyny and society's obsession with youth culture. And that's just in the album opener.

"Fooling the madonna, chasing after youthful skin / watching your own age drip, softening your trying limbs," she sings in the middle of the stage, staring down the front row of the sold-out crowd and plucking out a playful guitar line. The tone of "Tokyo" isn't sad or vulnerable, despite the depressing theme; instead, it seems to mock the song's pathetic main character. It laughs in his face. Teeny's sisters Katherine and Lizzie join in on the group chorus, along with bassist Boshra AlSaadi, all singing in major-key jubilation as if ganging up to ridicule him.

One thing is for sure: Even though TEEN started as Teeny's solo project after leaving the band Here We Go Magic, the harmonies they create as a four-piece are crucial to their identity. Boshra is all business on stage left as she shells out quirky harmonies and a bassline (which is mixed too low on the album, unfortunately). Younger sister Lizzie looks almost shy behind her stacks of keyboards—although she's probably just focused on the intricate weave of notes she laying down under Teeny's melodies. Katherine, the oldest Lieberson, keeps a straight face too, leaving the theatrics to her frontwoman sis, as she keeps them steady with her snare.

At Joe's Shanghai in Chinatown the next day, the group dynamics echo what I saw onstage. They order "family style"—two orders of soup dumplings, scallion pancakes, cold noodles with sesame sauce—debating over how much they could eat and their starch intake. We shared hot and sour soup and some sautéed greens too. Teeny is still the voice of the group, taking charge of answering my questions, and much of our conversation is a back and forth between her and Katherine. Teeny invokes a few responses out of Lizzie; Boshra, who stayed up after the release show to watch the pilot of HBO's Vinyl, which stars a few of their friends, is completely dazed. They're about to embark on a tour, and Boshra needs more sleep.

Their red jumpsuits are gone, obviously, but they've all taken to layering for winter like pros. Teeny's wearing a royal blue hoodie that says "MY WAY ALL DAY."

"Where'd you get that? Big D's?" Katherine asks. I automatically assumed that since they spent so much time together they already knew everything about each other, but I guess I was wrong. Teeny's a fan of discount stores and some of last night's outfit came from a kung fu shop down the street in Chinatown called Bok Lei Po Trading Inc.

Besides practicing five hours a day to prepare for their three-month tour, the whole Love Yes cycle started with a whole lotta togetherness in January 2014, when they holed themselves up in a cabin in Woodstock, New York, for a month. That plan, however romantic and Bon Iver-esque as it sounds, didn't work out, though.

"We started workshopping, trying to write, and it wasn't very productive," Teeny says. "I think it was because we were putting too much pressure on ourselves. We've been touring a lot, and I, personally, was wiped out."

They scrapped everything but "Please," a heartbreaking track Lizzie wrote about her late father, noted composer Peter Lieberson, who died in 2011. In the song, she imagines herself back in their home in Halifax, Nova Scotia, talking to her dad and what he would have said if he were still there. "What did he see that I cannot believe? / What kind of woman did he think that I'd be?" she sings longingly. Onstage, as she questions her identity and father's place in it, she relies on the microphone to project her soft voice. She tells me that it's not difficult to perform such an emotional song. "I'm more focusing on me just singing well," she says.

After the brutally cold month upstate, the foursome returned to New York City to do some more writing and then took a break to tour with Will Butler and Lower Dens in March. Teeny escaped to Kentucky for a bit, and she found her time there much more productive on the songwriting front.

"Talk about a place where people aren't self-conscious about their feelings at all," she says about the freedom to be creative in Kentucky, compared to stifling New York scene. There's a tradition of families playing and people have fun doing so. It took me away from a lot of this—the fashion side of music, what's popular, what's trendy."

Katherine agrees: "It just feels very enriching and supported and earthy in a way that a city obviously doesn't. Even Upstate New York—everything has a different flavor."

Location, although unintentional, is a large influence on Love Yes—both in its creation and lyrically. On "Noise Shift," with its bouncy beats and Of Montreal-like gang vocals, they describe a sweltering, crusty New York City, name-dropping Chinatown in summer, "trash piles for everyone to climb over." Of course, Lizzie returns home in "Please." And in "Tokyo," Teeny sings about the unknown and the desirable. There's a reason for this, they say.

"When I write songs, I'm always imagining a landscape of some sort," Teeny says, after asking the server for some rice. "I like thinking about stories and the place one is in a story would definitely affect my tale. Also, if you think about Chinatown, it's so colorful. Same thing about Tokyo. I have never been there but I feel like all the images I've seen is some vivacious, bright thing. It's just fantasy."

"I think about it more personal experience," Lizzie says after Teeny asks about how geography plays into her process. "I'm not as fantastical as you are. I don't think I've ever written from the third person or anyone else's point of view. It's always personal with me."

There are deeper instrumental intricacies on the album—like the ever-moving keyboard lines and horn and sax interludes—but the vocal arrangements stand alone as complicated compositions. In "All About Us," the catchiest tune on the project, the band immediately plugs into a chorus, singing, "It wasn't all about us / it was only about you and me this one time." And when that section is over, Teeny rapidly moves on to five different vocal sections, barely leaving time for a breath. It's an unlikely A-B-A-C-D-E-C-A format.

Their music has been pulling in comparisons to Frank Zappa, which Teeny doesn't understand.

"I never listen to Zappa so I don't really know," she says. "I guess he has the wacky, off-kilter. I'm not a huge Zappa fan. Honestly I don't listen to him enough to know."

"The only thing I could think of is the bit of absurdity," Boshra adds from across the table. That part makes sense—they have the quirkiness, the rapidity of keyboard and the expressive ad-libs. But they heard more nonsensical comparisons over the years:

"Haim, all the time. Sisters," Katherine says. "Musically, it doesn't make any sense. Savages has come up, and they're totally different. It's really irritating actually. Just because they're another all-female band, and there aren't that many so it's like that's the only comparison. Not that it's an insult, but we're nothing like them."

"We got Warpaint a ton," Teeny says. "Which that makes a little more sense because they're psych. The only thing we have in common is that we're all women. And I'm sure all those bands get that shit all the time."

"Do you get called a 'girl band?'" I ask, taking a not-so-wild guess.

"No," Teeny answers bluntly, calling out my obvious question. "All the time. It's really frustrating. First of all, we're women. Secondly, that's not a defining character… You know, that's all the more important for us to keep playing music."

And play music they will—but not before maneuvering the maze of Chinatown and making a stop at the kung fu store to stake out TEEN's next onstage outfits.

TEEN are currently on tour. Check them out at one of the dates below:

February 26 – Stony Brook, NY @ Stony Brook University
February 27 – Hudson, NY @ Half Moon
March 9 – Richmond, VA @ Gallery 5
March 10 – Asheville, NC @ Tiger Mountain
March 11 – Charleston, SC @ Tin Roof
March 12 – Atlanta, GA @ Drunken Unicorn
March 13 – Birmingham, AL @ Syndicate Lounge
March 14 – Baton Rouge, LA @ Spanish Moon
March 16-20 – Austin, TX @ SXSW
March 21 – El Paso, TX @ Lowbrow Palace
March 24 – Tuscon, AZ @ Club Congress
March 25 – San Diego, CA @ Whistle Stop Bar
March 26 – Los Angeles, CA @ Breezer Vol. I at Fais Do-Do
March 28 – Salt Lake City, UT @ Kilby Court
March 29 – Denver, CO @ Hi-Dive
March 31 – Omaha, NE @ O’Leaver’s
April 1 – Iowa City, IA @ Gabe’s
April 2 – Grand Rapids, MI @ Ladyfest GR
April 4 – Detroit, MI @ Marble Bar
April 5 – Toronto, ON @ The Silver Dollar Room

Emilee Lindner knows kung fu. Follow her on Twitter.