Teen Men – ‘Teen Men’ (album stream) (Premiere)

Teen Men take their name from a Playboy advert dating back to the ’60s. The opening tune of their new, self-titled LP, “Hiding Records (So Dangerous)”, begins with a phrase that sounds like an alternate take on the Rugrats theme. From this, one can reasonably infer that “playful” is among the adjectives one can pin on the Delaware-based quartet. Yet this slightly goofy creativity exists not merely for the purpose of giggle-inducing; rather, it’s another dimension to Teen Men’s multi-colored sonic canvas. To hear these colors in play, you can stream Teen Men in full below.

Teen Men’s Nick Krill says to PopMatters, “There is a great Legs McNeil quote about punk music, describing it as

about saying it [is] okay to be amateurish and funny, that real creativity [comes] out of making a mess, it [is] about working with what you got in front of you and turning everything embarrassing, awful, and stupid in your life to your advantage.

“In a way, that quote about punk also seems to sum of the ethos of Teen Men. While we are not at all sonically like a punk band, it feels like we share some of the creative ethos of some of the original punk movement. But maybe we are making introverted punk; we aren’t rebelling against any outside establishment, but we’re rebelling against our own internal establishment, trying to shake our own recording, songwriting, and video making habits. We are kind of trying to put ourselves in uncomfortable artistic situations in the hope that it will scare us into finding new solutions.”

Teen Men is out on 9 June on CD/digital and 14 June on Vinyl through the Bar/None label.