The Southern slowcore band from Texas, have shared “Holy Water,” the arresting new single from their forthcoming new album, Magic Of The Sale, out August 8th via Winspear. The track arrives with a video by Alan “Rickman” Official. The track features lead vocals from the band’s Madeline Dowd and pedal steel by Wednesday and MJ Lenderman’s Xandy Chelmis.
Paste Magazine, who profiled the band today and named them The Best of What’s Next, is saying “the record is an honest, stripped-back walk through life’s universal heartbreak, from the acceptance of our mutual exploitation to the lies we tell ourselves to just get through the day. The results are as solemn as they are beautiful.”
The band announced the album last month with a video for its title track “Magic Of The Sale,” which was named the Best Song of the Week by Stereogum who praised its “hi-fi production and a grandiosity,” saying “there are flashes of ambient and indie-pop and emo and post-rock threaded into the song’s slowcore foundation, all of it cohering into a gorgeous slow-build swoon that levels off into a cloud of euphoric melancholia.”
On Magic Of The Sale, Teethe unveil their sad and beautiful world, where the Texas band’s four distinct songwriters, singers, and artists ask a series of interlocked questions about what it means to build a life in a time of shared collapse. Magic Of The Sale is a soft but steely record about the worst quandaries we can encounter, from being trapped by an existence we didn’t entirely create to the hell that other people can be.
Teethe is hitting the road this fall and winter on a tour that includes a stop at Pitchfork Music Festival London in November. All dates below.
Magic Of The Sale is an expansive next step for the band, one that folds new collaborators into the mix—Xandy Chelmis of Wednesday, Charlie Martin of Hovvdy, Logan Hornyak of Melaina Kol and several other veteran musicians. Still, Teethe took special care to preserve the part of the process that made their debut so special, now with expanded toolkits. On Magic Of The Sale, they’ve boosted their gear and home studios and dug into the craft of composition and production. Without an outsider producer or engineer, the band’s Boone Patrello spent four months mixing the record–taking the patchwork of tracks from each member and their collaborators and funneling several visions into one complete picture. From a long-overlooked pocket of Texas’ musical wealth, Teethe returns with a deeply layered and collaborative work that makes the weight of the world feel a little lighter to lug.
Tour Dates:
09/05 – Phoenix, AZ @ Valley Bar
09/06 – Los Angeles, CA @ Zebulon
09/07 – San Francisco, CA @ Rickshaw Stop
09/09 – Portland, OR @ Polaris Hall
09/10 – Seattle, WA @ Barboza
09/12 – Boise, ID @ Shrine Basement
09/13 – Salt Lake City, UT @ Kilby Court
09/14 – Denver, CO @ Globe Hall
10/16 – Houston, TX @ White Oak Music Hall (Upstairs)
10/17 – Austin, TX @ 29th Street Ballroom
10/18 – Denton, TX @ Rubber Gloves
10/31 – Brussels, BE @ Les Nuits Botanique
11/01 – Amsterdam, NL @ London Calling
11/05 – Paris, FR @ Pitchfork Music Festival
11/08 – London, UK @ Pitchfork Music Festival
12/01 – Nashville @ drkmttr
12/02 – Atlanta @ Aisle 5
12/04 – Washington, DC @ DC9
12/05 – Philadelphia @ PhilaMOCA
12/07 – Boston @ Brighton Music Hall
12/09 – Toronto @ The Drake
12/10 – Lakewood @ Mahalls
12/11 – Columbus @ Ace of Cups
12/12 – Chicago @ Schubas Tavern
12/13 – Milwaukee @ X-Ray Arcade
12/14 – Minneapolis @ 7th St Entry
12/16 – Oklahoma City @ Resonant Head
Before there was Teethe, there were other acts and assorted solo projects, all outlets for the four people who would eventually become a single band to write and record songs of their own. In Denton, Texas, a little more than a half-decade ago, the music scene gradually did what any good one should do: connected people with shared interests and sensibilities and encouraged them in turn to push, collectively, a bit further. For Teethe, the dual nexuses were house shows and a mutual enthusiasm for home recording. Four songwriters began to share once-siloed works, rounding out one another’s drafts until they’d steadily but casually built a record—Teethe’s 2020 self-titled debut, a loose and warm 12-track collage of exquisite existential blues and twilit harmonies. Their expectations were modest, but a few early cassette runs slowly led to several sold-out vinyl editions, unlikely name-drops from mega-stars, and several tours across the United States and Europe. Born of living-room jams and DIY spaces, Teethe seemed to stumble toward success on a path they proudly made themselves.
A decade ago, not long after Teethe founder Boone Patrello began his band Dead Sullivan, he met Madeline Dowd during their earliest days at the University of North Texas. She started a band, Crisman, and then joined the group of Grahm Robinson, MAH KEE OH, for a tour alongside Dead Sullivan. After Jordan Garrett joined Dowd’s Crisman in 2019, the four people who would soon become Teethe were effectively interconnected. They played with one another in living rooms after their other bands finished practice and tinkered with reel-to-reel experiments, the stakes as low as any hangout but the connection high. If all those band names and rendezvous points along the way get confusing, just remember: They allowed the then-inchoate Teethe to connect without pressure or expectation, to discover the language they soon captured so elegantly.
Dowd painted the cover of Teethe’s first album, the confused look on the character’s face warped with worry and distorted by drips of pigment that suggest green tears. A similar figure reappears on the cover of Magic Of The Sale, again painted by Dowd. But that grimace of endless exhaustion is gone. Clad in red and caught mid-stride, they look more like a jester, a cool curiosity splashed across their face as they stand in an archway to welcome you to the vast world of uncharted land and sky just in the distance. That is how Teethe feels and sounds throughout Magic Of The Sale—newly confident but still full of questions about the unknown, about what comes next.
