In late July, Greg Katz, the lead singer of Cheekface, mailed an identical postcards to followers who had purchased merch from the Los Angeles indie-rock trio. On one facet was an announcement of a brand new file, which might be surprise-released Aug. 2. “Relying on when you find yourself studying this, our new album Too A lot to Ask is out now, or it’s about to come back out,” Katz wrote. On the other was an illustration of a pleading-faced canine — the album’s art work, designed by bassist Amanda “Mandy” Tannen.
The postcard’s return tackle recognized the sender as “America’s Native Band Cheekface.”
Trade knowledge means that surprise-releasing an album on a Tuesday with no advance discover besides a chunk of snail mail shouldn’t be how an indie band ought to function in 2022. However Cheekface, whose euphorically dorky music combines power-pop hooks with Katz’s quippy, deadpan talk-singing, has not amassed a small however passionate following by heeding typical knowledge. With Too A lot to Ask, Cheekface ship their third album in three-and-a-half years, every one brimming with cheerful songs about anxiousness, local weather collapse and the jumbled absurdity of late capitalism — songs that are actually shouted again at concert events by “Cheek Freaks” (the Cheekface equal of a Deadhead).
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“Over the previous 12 months, we needed to tour much more, and we did not,” Tannen says, who sings backing vocals and co-writes with Katz. “We simply sat there, like, ‘What can we do now?’ I used to be like, ‘Properly, we’ve got a bunch of songs written. Why do not we simply file them and put out an album as a substitute?’” With no loyalty to the normal album roll-out cycle — “to me, that course of by no means made that a lot sense,” Katz says — they determined to shock their followers.
And there’s loads right here to shock Cheek Freaks. Though Too A lot to Ask doesn’t stray removed from Cheekface’s signature mixture of extraordinarily on-line non-sequiturs and exuberant choruses, the band sought to make a extra eclectic album than 2021’s Emphatically No. and, in Katz’s phrases, “broaden the Overton window of acceptable Cheekface sounds.” So we get a strummy duet with Boston songwriter Sidney Gish (“Election Day,” the closest factor to a Cheekface ballad) subsequent door to an uptempo protest anthem known as “You All the time Need to Bomb the Center East,” with its am-I-hearing-that-correctly refrain.
And we get a propulsive, dancy experiment like “Featured Singer,” which — if not for its shout-outs to TikTok teenagers and Venmoing somebody for ketamine — may have been on an early LCD Soundsystem album. The track grew out of a poem Katz wrote, imagining what it could be prefer to give up slumming in bands and simply be the faceless vocalist on a success EDM track. It was constructed round a loop of a bassline Tannen despatched Katz throughout lockdown: “I used to be like, ‘Rattling, that bassline goes loopy,’” Katz remembers.
If “Featured Singer” is the album’s centerpiece, “Noodles” is its unstable wildcard. The minute-long tune achieves that Ween trick of repeating some absurd phrase again and again so obnoxiously that it dares you to hitch in. In actual fact, Katz admits it was closely impressed by Ween’s rejected Pizza Hut jingle “The place’d The Cheese Go?” “Once we introduced it to Greg Cortez, who produced the file, he was like, ‘Properly, you guys are totally in your Ween shit with this one,’” Katz laughs.
[Photo by Miriam Brummel]
The trio (Katz, Tannen and drummer Mark “Echo” Edwards) is chatting by way of Zoom as their tour van glides by way of the Arizona desert. They’ve simply completed a small tour by way of the South and Midwest, taking part in less-frequented cities that followers have been DMing them from, asking them to play. The evening earlier than the interview, they performed a present in Phoenix that coincided with extreme thunderstorms and flooding.
“We had been sitting within the inexperienced room between units, getting a flash flood warning that was like, ‘Keep the place you’re. It is a life-threatening scenario.’ Water was coming down the partitions of the inexperienced room,” Katz says.
The band figured nobody would come to the present. They had been fallacious; Phoenix’s Valley Bar was quickly populated with followers coming up and down and participating in the call-and-response fervor of “Take heed to Your Coronary heart.” “No,” a tune in regards to the insistent messages your mind sends you while you’re coping with psychological sickness.
“I believe that reveals you the dedication of the Cheek Freaks,” Katz says, “that they’re prepared to face the federal government warning of imminent dying and say, ‘Fuck it, I’ma go see Cheekface.’”
Cheekface are hardly a cool band. Katz — whose voice is extra Jonathan Richman than Jeff Buckley — is the sort of frontman who performs in a DEVO-like jumpsuit and leads his band in a canopy of “Cha Cha Slide” to the confusion of Zoomers who suppose it’s an unique. Whereas their reliance on talk-singing could be the geeky American reply to Moist Leg or Dry Cleansing, Cheekface have extra in frequent with Cake, They Would possibly Be Giants, Lifeless Milkmen and even Das Racist (a serious affect on Katz) — enjoyable, smartass teams that freely combined humor and music and appealed to impassioned weirdos.
In the meantime, despite no real label support, Cheekface have constructed a small however loyal grassroots following, which on Spotify quantities to just about 90,000 month-to-month listeners. The Cheek Freaks are passionate; some get Cheekface-inspired tattoos, whereas others sketch the band’s lyrics. One fan just lately grew to become so obsessed that he drew an ad for a fake 1980s cartoon show about Cheekface.
“Me and Mandy began writing these songs with out pondering folks had been ever going to listen to them,” Katz says. “We had been simply making some bizarre stuff for enjoyable. So the truth that it’s not simply reached folks, however actually spoken to some folks, is one thing we weren’t anticipating, anticipating, planning for or pondering of.”
Though Cheekface are nonetheless a younger band (fashioned in 2017, they launched debut album Remedy Island in 2019), the person members are throughout 30 and have been concerned in music since lengthy earlier than Cheekface’s inception.
Katz, who grew up in Orange County, has been out and in of bands since center faculty, however Cheekface is his first time as lead singer. “I’d at all times been, like, the second particular person in a band,” Katz says. “I’ve been the one that sings one or two songs within the set.”
Within the mid-2000s, Katz studied philosophy at UCLA, the place he managed the campus radio station and was roommates with music critic David Greenwald. “Greg was possibly the one particular person on campus who owned a Dismemberment Plan shirt after I met him,” Greenwald says. “He struck me as a severely gifted, encyclopedic one that may out-snob or out-perform anybody however put his power again into the group and his buddies as a substitute. He was the sort of man who would provide you with a last-minute journey to and from Disneyland, no questions requested, however would additionally not hesitate to roast bro tradition or my penchant for Foreman-grilling fish in our condominium. That double-edged sword of bone-dry humor and caring lots that you just hear in Cheekface’s lyrics — that is Greg. Listening to the band appears like speaking to my good friend.”
After graduating into the Nice Recession, Katz labored varied A&R jobs and performed bass in a band known as LA Font. In 2011, he acquired laid off and determined to launch his personal file label, New Professor Music, which proved to be a crash course in each side of the business.
Round 2017, Katz met Tannen, a graphic designer who had moved from New York to Los Angeles. “A pair years into residing in L.A., I used to be pondering, ‘I wish to begin taking part in once more, however I actually do not know anybody right here,’” Tannen says. She had a graphic designer good friend who was relationship Katz and instructed the 2 begin collaborating. “We would see one another at reveals and say, ‘Heeyy! Wanna write?’ ‘Yeah, let’s write sometime!’” Tannen remembers. “It took some time, after which Greg was identical to, ‘We’re writing tomorrow.’ And I am like, ‘OK!’”
A classically skilled cellist in her youth, Tannen had pivoted to rock in school and performed bass for the goth-flavored New York band Stellastarr*, which grew to become a buzzy identify throughout the mid-2000s post-punk revival. Stellastarr* signed to RCA and even toured with the Killers in 2004 (the Killers had been the opener!). However Stellastarr*’s second album, 2005’s Harmonies for the Haunted, acquired swallowed up by RCA’s merger with Sony and by no means took off. The band self-released yet one more album in 2009 and fizzled out.
With Cheekface, Tannen needed to strive one thing totally different: a band that experience its dorkiness. A band the place she might be foolish and fulfilled and totally herself. “When Greg and I fashioned the band, it was identical to, ‘I wanna be in a band that’s not cool.’ Like, particularly,” Tannen says. “We each simply needed to have enjoyable and depart all of the advertising and marketing, enterprise, the entire machine behind music, behind.” They thought-about names akin to Plumping and Ryan Gosling’s Big Freakin’ Delts earlier than deciding on Cheekface.
[Photo by Miriam Brummel]
After recruiting Echo, a drummer Katz knew from the LA music scene, the musicians spent 2017 writing songs. A leftist political sensibility was central from the beginning. One of many first songs they wrote was “Dry Warmth/Good City,” a tune that satirizes the thought of a socialist utopia the place inexperienced juice is free. It grew to become Cheekface’s breakout single.
The monitor additionally established Cheekface’s default type, with Katz speaking by way of the verses earlier than breaking right into a hooky, sung-through refrain. They tried writing extra conventionally melodic songs. However once they veered in a extra spoken course, “we simply acquired increasingly enthusiastic about what we had been doing,” Katz informed me in 2021.
Early tracks akin to “Glendale” and “Attractive Nationwide Anthem” (by which Katz instructs the listener to “bury me with a sock tan”) had been unabashedly comedic, so it’s no marvel Cheekface’s songwriting course of appears like a author’s room. “When Mandy and I are spitballing lyric concepts, if one among us laughs, then we’re identical to, ‘Cool, that is going within the track,’” Katz says. Tannen interjects: “Even when it is a snigger over, ‘Wow, that’s actually darkish.’”
By 2018, the band had been performing commonly round LA — opening units, yard birthday events, tiny venues, no matter. They anticipated nothing. Crowds had been sparse.
Then got here the precise second Katz realized folks had been paying consideration. It was throughout a present at LA’s The Satellite tv for pc in 2019.
“There weren’t lots of people there for us, however there have been like 5 or 6 folks I did not know, and so they all screamed a lyric again at me from ‘Eternity Depart,’” Katz remembers. “I used to be so shocked that I forgot the following couple of strains. I used to be like, ‘What had been all these folks yelling about?’ After which I used to be like, ‘Oh. These had been a bunch of individuals I do not know screaming one of many lyrics we wrote again at me!’”
Should you’re undecided whether or not or not you want Cheekface, take heed to 30 seconds of a track. Any track. You’ll know fairly shortly.
Cheekface like their humor the best way they like their vocal screens: dry. (A word on their stage plot instructs venue employees: “no reverb, no delay, lyrics ought to be clear.”) A typical Cheekface track is a jumble of free-association one-liners (“Life is lengthy like a CVS receipt”), sociopolitical dread (“The local weather modified and I left it on learn”), oddball namechecks (“Dr. Bronner was not an actual physician”) and cultural callbacks (“Boyfriend with a soul patch/I do know, I do know, it’s critical”) combined with disarming doses of sincerity. If Cheekface had been round in 2004, this author would have had a Cheekface lyric as his AOL away message.
A Cheekface track thrives on juxtaposition: the juxtaposition between verse and refrain. The juxtaposition between Katz’s talk-singing and Tannen’s extra melodic cooing. The juxtaposition between morbid material and laughter. The juxtaposition between the meaningless absurdity of contemporary life and the real that means folks discover in music and creativity.
Anxiousness is a recurring theme. “I believe that for folks on this band, anxiousness and remedy are true and genuine matters to us,” Katz says. The band’s first album was known as Remedy Island. On their second, Katz sang the phrase “anxiousness” throughout the first 10 seconds. On the brand new file, Katz declares that his “mind is filled with barking canines” on a track titled “I Really feel So Bizarre!”
Cheekface have by no means wooed labels or aspired to be the following the 1975. They’ve at all times been unbiased. Indie labels have approached them, and so they’ve had these conversations, however it by no means felt like a match. Tannen admits she was heartbroken from her earlier experiences on RCA, and Katz likes placing out the information himself on New Professor. He coined the nickname “America’s Native Band” as a tribute to his fondness for obscure native bands that can by no means get enormous however are beloved of their communities.
“What we do is fairly idiosyncratic,” Katz says. “I believe that anybody who owns a label senses that disconnect, that we could be modestly well-liked and that may work for us. However being modestly well-liked would not work that effectively for labels.”
Although their songs cull freely from the irony and context collapse of overly on-line humor — sure, that’s Echo saying “Sir, it is a Wendy’s” on “Pledge Drive” — Cheekface categorical no cynicism about this modest reputation. They’re earnestly and sincerely thrilled by the truth that persons are listening. Their households are thrilled, too.
“My dad and mom have come see me play in a number of failing bands through the years,” Katz says, “and I believe they’re excited that this one has some spark of one thing round it.”
