Tag: Growing Pains

You’ll have a “Crush” on Growing Pains’ new single.

Last month, Portland’s Growing Pains announced their new LP Daniel Loves Mandy Forever, which will be released on their new label home Photo Finish on October 9th. Composed of Jack Havrilla, Kyle Kraft, Kalia Storer and Carl Taylor — the band have become one of the most buzzed about acts in the Pacific Northwest over the past year or so, after sharing stages with bands like MX Lonely, Alien Boy, Been Stellar, Water From Your Eyes, Beabadoobee and Dutch Interior.

Their new album, which was produced by Nathan Tucker of Strange Ranger, is an ambitious record made up of songs about desire so all-consuming that it warps the world around it. The compositional scale of these songs matches their emotional intensity. Across Daniel Loves Mandy Forever, Taylor and Havrilla’s guitar lines nod to the intricacy of midwest emo before erupting into clouds of fuzzy power chords, while Kraft plays with the crash-heavy maximalism of an arena-rock drummer. Storer’s voice is a hazy, dreamlike presence, her relative calm amid the turbulence building a gently surreal atmosphere.

The band’s influences aren’t buried here—the immediacy of Joyce Manor, the enormity of My Bloody Valentine, the scrappy melodicism of Pacific Northwest indie rock—and their non-musical inspirations are fittingly grand and varied. Early single “Swimming” draws images from a trip to an art museum that Storer and Taylor took together, where they saw a biblical depiction of Jacob wrestling with an angel, where “Drive” includes layered references to Bruce Springsteen and Roy Orbison. 

Today, the band are sharing a new single entitled “Crush,” which was inspired by David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive.

Taylor says of the single:

This song is about trying, but failing to comprehend the nature of desire with language. How do you articulate the failure of language? This song tries to examine this space–a breakthrough of romantic desire creating delirium in the subject.

Keep your mind open.

[I’ll have a crush on you if you subscribe.]

[Thanks to Tom at Terrorbird Media.]

Growing Pains release their first new single since 2023 – “Swimming.”

Over the last year the Portland band Growing Pains have become one of the most buzzed about bands in the Pacific Northwest. Composed of Jack Havrilla, Kyle Kraft, Kalia Storer and Carl Taylor — the band began popping up on bills around when they were still teenagers, and in more recent times have toured up and down the West Coast while sharing stages with bands like MX Lonely, Alien Boy, Been Stellar, Water From Your Eyes, Beabadoobee and Dutch Interior. 

Despite the recent buzz around the band, Growing Pains haven’t released any new music since a 2023 EP that came out while they were still in high school. Today, the band are announcing their signing to the label Photo Finish, and sharing their first single since that EP, a track called “Swimming.”

“Swimming” is as an immediate and streamlined guitar pop track with the melodic heft to read like a lost early oughts alternative radio hit. Recalling ’90s icons like Liz Phair and Julianna Hatfield as re-imagined by Joyce Manor, the single is an immensely promising first statement from an ambitious young band determined to meet their moment.  

Storer says of the track: “This song is about the helpless feeling that comes from being romantically incompetent. I wrote it after going on a date and they put their arm around me and it felt wrong. I left and went to the airport to watch the planes fly and drink a beer on my truck. Then all of the words came to me—this was the night before our last day of recording.”

Keep your mind open.

[Swim over to the subscription box!]

[Thanks to Tom at Terrorbird Media.]