Dear Boy Reveal “Love Interest” (video premiere)

You might be forgiven for thinking
Dear Boy hails from England. Songs such as “Love Interest”, for which the band has just issued a new video, are buoyed by rhythms that could have crawled from the London or Manchester scenes circa 1981. The chorus is breezy, memorable and the humor just a little bit darker than that of anything American. The lead singer’s last name is even Grey. But Dear Boy comes from the Los Angeles and yet those sun-soaked origins do nothing to undermine the group’s Anglophile leanings, a tendency to go T.S. Eliot and become more British than the British.

The group wrote its debut EP in Vauxhall, London, recording with Chad Bamford (Spiritualized) and mixed by Michael Patterson (Trent Reznor, Black Rebel Motorcycle Club). Released in the fall of 2013, the EP earned our Los Angeles friends opening dates with Peter Murphy, the Airborne Toxic Event, and others. Between that effort and 2017’s
Parts of a Flower, the group issued the single “Hesitation Waltz” to critical acclaim.

The new single arrives on the eve of dates with Rogue Wave and a growing sense that Dear Boy its share of hits to come, “Love Interest” (with a new video directed by Baley Wynn) being one of them.

Grey says that the track was “written for our clumsy years. We wanted to write something recklessly optimistic about love and the joys of being out of your depth. Pulp had a big influence on this song. I wasn’t old enough to have them on my high school walls, but whenever I listen to them now, there’s a bizarre sense memory of something I never experienced. That’s a quality we were hoping to nuzzle up to while recording. Disco 2000 meet Disco 2018.”

TOUR DATES
05.05 – Los Angeles, CA @ The Lodge Room

05.11 – San Francisco, CA @ The Independent

05.12 – Sonoma, CA @ Gundlach Bundschu Winery

05.18 – Portland, OR @ Wonder Ballroom

05.19 – Seattle, WA @ The Crocodile

05.20 – Missoula, MT @ Top Hat Lounge

* all shows with Rogue Wave