TEEN – “Tokyo”

TEEN – “Tokyo”

All About Us,” the first single from TEEN’s upcoming third full-length Love Yes, teetered like a Jenga tower about to topple. “Tokyo,” their follow-up, takes a bit more of a laid-back approach but is no less ambitious in its scope. The song’s moving parts ricochet off each other antagonistically — all recorded live in the studio, no multi-tracking — and make for a brash, buoyant distillation of the song’s theme of losing desire as we grow older, and what that says about our society as a whole. Here’s how Teeny Lieberson describes the impetus behind the song:

“Tokyo” is the story of a man who loses interest in his wife and fantasizes about leaving her. His loss of interest is not merely a reflection of his feelings, but rather his unwillingness to grow old and the challenge age puts to his ego. His experience illuminates our societal obsession with youth culture and our ingrained fear of aging and loss of power. We value women only in the virgin ideal, often because they are thought to be conquerable and and a vessel for validating dominance. We would prefer to live in the fantasy of young skin rather than face our growth and relinquish control to our inevitable death.

Listen via NPR below.

Love Yes is out 2/19 via Carpark Records.

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