Teen Suicide - Nude Descending Staircase Headless

8.0

A brief introductory note for those in the Italian audience who may not yet be familiar with them: Teen Suicide are a duo from Baltimore, originally formed as the solo project of Sam Ray. Sam records everything on his own using extremely lo-fi means (a laptop, cassette tapes), releasing music online without any real long-term plan. Everything changes with the release of Bad Vibes Forever in 2011, a collection of demos that would later prove crucial for the online lo-fi/emo scene. Since then, the project has gone through four albums, several lineup changes, and even name changes, eventually arriving at its current form with the addition of Kitty Pryde, Sam’s wife. After roughly a decade under the Run for Cover label—known in the US for successfully guiding emo artists from the underground to a much wider audience without diluting their sound—the Maryland duo returns with a fifth record, the first to be fully recorded in a proper studio, under the direction of Mike Sapone (a producer associated with acts such as Public Enemy, Taking Back Sunday, and Brand New). The title likely references Marcel Duchamp’s Nu descendant un escalier n°2, a painting inspired by chronophotography depicting a faceless mannequin, which Teen Suicide reimagine as “headless.” What does it mean? Everything, and perhaps nothing. There is no coherent concept underpinning the record; instead, its leitmotif is a kind of “living death”: Living Death, Anhedonia, Suffering all revolve around the idea of not being dead, but not truly alive either—due to the loss of pleasure, identity, drugs, and nihilism.

The lethargic, depressing intro immediately sets the mood, only to erupt halfway through into the most overwhelming, self-destructive grungegaze you could possibly imagine. This will be a recurring thread throughout the record: for instance, the following track Idiot opens with a massive riff that seems to resurrect The Smashing Pumpkins, backed by compression that edges into stoner territory, before giving way to a seductive and unexpected section of dreamy arpeggios and guitars. Spiders is essentially the same idea, but with the parts reversed, while Kitty’s vocals are saturated and pushed to the edge in a way reminiscent of Kim Gordon at her most abrasive moments. If Kindnesses nods to Everlong (by now almost a cliché in the US scene), even more canonical grungegaze—if such a term can even be said to exist—is found in Candy/Squeeze and Living Death, which sit closer to label-mates like Nothing. Across the rest of the tracklist there is a strong presence of slacker aesthetics and a kind of “depression taken lightly” sensibility: just looking at the titles (Suffering, Everything in my Life is Perfect, Come and See the Clown) reveals the tension between the dark, anxious imagery and the playful irony suggested by riffs that sit somewhere between teen rock and freak scene. Often, emo lyrics manage to bypass their own heaviness through energy and dynamics; here, even when the listener is distracted by the inventive arrangements, the discomfort remains fully present from beginning to end—and that, quite likely, is precisely the intention.