Hold onto your frayed jackets, Austin. Art Pop — the Grossenbacher brothers just plugged their existential dread straight into the city’s power grid. “teenage scum” is ode to crawling out of the primordial ooze of adolescence, a self-produced cocktail lobbed from a childhood bedroom that still smells like stale ambition and broken guitar strings. Max and Miles are more than a band. They’re a shared nervous system screaming into GarageBand.
This is bedroom rock at its most authentically pissed-off. This track was forged in the crucible of suburban Austin, recorded between dumped laundry and existential Google Drive links after Miles split for college. That separation WAS the ghost in the machine. The miles between them didn’t kill the noise; it amplified it. Sending stems across fibre-optic cables like digital love letters dipped in battery acid. No producers. No suits. Just two brothers translating loneliness into jagged, beautiful voltage. This is DIY not as an aesthetic – it’s damn oxygen.
Imagine Lou Reed chain-smoking over Radiohead’s paranoid soundscapes while LCD Soundsystem’s drum machine has a panic attack. That’s the beautiful, ugly truth of “teenage scum”. Guitars don’t riff here – they splinter. Rhythms don’t groove – they stumble forward like a pissed-off sleepwalker. And the vocals are pure, unfiltered frustration, crackling like a walkie-talkie broadcast from the edge of a breakdown. It’s the sound of being told you’re “too much” and deciding, “heck yeah, I am.”
“teenage scum” is just a preview of their upcoming LP “This Is Art Pop”. It’s steeped in themes of alienation (“loneliness, longing, anger, frustration with the world”) but never wallows. Instead, it thrashes—transforming pain into propulsion.
While LA polishes plastic anthems in million-dollar echo chambers, Max and Miles are sweating truth onto a laptop mic in Texas. That “gloriously unpolished edge” – that’s the whole point. It’s the sound of authenticity bleeding through cheap interfaces. This track is for the kid doodling band logos in math class, the overthinker dissecting every awkward interaction at 2 AM, the perpetual outsider who knows “scum” just means “not yet processed into something bland.” It’s the anthem for the beautifully unfinished.
Play “teenage scum” until your subwoofer whimpers. This shows that real rock ‘n’ roll isn’t made in boardrooms; it’s clawed out of separation, confusion, and the defiant, beautiful noise of two brothers refusing to sanitise their souls. If the album hits this hard? Start digging the grave for sterile alt-rock. Art Pop just brought the shovel.