Share new track & video "Faces" and announce signing to Luminelle Recordings.
Debut EP TELL U out October 30th.
NYC-based synth trio Couch Prints - comprised of Jayanna Roberts, Brandon Tong, and Jake Truax - share a new track and video for ‘Faces’. Today’s release comes alongside their announcement of their official signing to Luminelle Recordings, the collaborative label of Gorilla Vs. Bear and Fat Possum/House Arrest. Couch Print’s debut EP Tell U will be out on Friday, October 30th. ‘Faces’ follows the previously released tracks ‘Tell U’ and ‘Of Drawing.’
Brandon Tong says of the track,
“The first few years after high school were filled with this sort of warped vision of what a relationship was. I’d been on and off with this person for so many years, and though it was clear it wasn’t working, we kept up this cycle because we had both normalized the hurt we were putting on each other.
Faces is about that sort of breaking point you go through, where you accept that you’re going to do it all over and send that ‘u up?’ text or whatever it is. We recorded it with Jayanna, but the production
we did was like really cheesy 80’s synth-pop, so we shelved it.”
Jake Truax continues,
“Ya and probably a year later, I gave the stems of the song to my friend, a sound-designer named Nate Rennick, to mess around with. We had been inspired a lot more by ambient and experimental music and we knew he’d be able to create some really interesting textured drones and basses.
When he sent it back to us we were all floored. It was just incredible and so moving in the way
he’d re-contextualized it.
It was a huge turning point for us, as we were uncertain of the sonic direction we wanted to go after Tell U and Of Drawing, but after hearing that song we knew exactly the type of music we wanted
to make.”
Some groups, like certain friendships, come together as if by fate. Jake Truax (guitar) and Brandon Tong (keys) first met in gym class in the seventh grade of their Denver, Colorado junior high school, and immediately became friends. To pass the hours outside of school, the two spent their time skating and listening to music, their days soundtracked by groups like Frou Frou, The Sounds, and Shiny Toy Guns. As they grew up, they began to experiment making music, though never collaborating together. The two stayed close despite going to different colleges, and when Jake moved to Paris for his undergraduate, Brandon came to visit with the idea of recording some songs as a group. Inspired by many of the acts they had grown up listening to as middle schoolers, the result was a unique amalgam of synthpop, 90s dance music, and indie rock.
Jake first heard Jayanna Roberts (vocals) playing a ukulele and singing in the courtyard of his Paris college, months after Brandon had returned to Denver. The two quickly became friends and collaborators, writing songs together for french class. Jayanna returned to New York the following semester, around the time Brandon moved to Brooklyn permanently. When Jake visited the city to record with him, he suggested they call Jayannna. The trio booked a rehearsal space at a now-demolished warehouse in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, and got to work. Jayanna’s energy and unique vocal tone meshed perfectly with their songs, and they left the second day with a recorded demo of the first official Couch Prints song, “Tell U.”
An immersive synthpop exploration, ‘Tell U’ is the sound of a new group somehow already fully-formed. The song is a remarkable combination of the transient wistfulness of being young, the longing for the past and also a desire for new things to come. After finishing the demo, the group worked with Billy Pavone at his studio in Brooklyn on additional production and mixing, and with Joe LaPorta at Sterling Sound to finish the master. (LaPorta would go on to master the rest of the group’s debut EP as well.) The response to ‘Tell U’ was far beyond anything the group expected. The song caught the ear of Chris Cantalini from Gorilla Vs. Bear, and found its way onto the Spotify playlists Fresh Finds and Bedroom Pop. Seeing the potential in this new group, Jake moved to New York permanently, and Couch Prints became a reality.
Written and recorded in various cities, states, and countries over a period of two years, Couch Prints’ debut EP stands as a journalistic testament to the early life of the group, both as people and as musicians. The songs span cities and countries, relationships falling apart and new ones coming together, the way the present and past are permanently entangled. It’s a chronicle of a group finding its own identity and pushing the limits of what pop can be, moving easily from quiet ambience to sing-along bliss. The group describes the EP as an attempt to express those feelings that can’t easily be described, for music to function where words alone fail. More than anything, the EP is a celebration of the beauty inherent in even the most mundane aspects of life, Couch Prints’ sonic tribute to the strangeness of being.
Tell U EP