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.]