Coming off their invigorating first headlining tour, the duo Daisy the Great found themselves back in New York City, tending to their regular lives again. As they reentered the world, Mina Walker and Kelley Dugan found pleasure and pathos in mundane tasks, like going to the grocery store, walking anonymously through bustling streets, and sitting alone in their respective bedrooms. In these unremarkable spaces, the duo found room for introspection, which grounds Daisy the Great’s sharp and playful new album: The Rubber Teeth Talk. In their transitional stage, Walker and Dugan paid special attention to the skewed logic of dreams, which bring unconscious desires to light. These revelations can be both prosaic and profound, delivered with wit. On the edgy lead single “Ballerina,” Daisy the Great emerge from a childhood dream. “I wake up at 4:00 a.m. these days, I’ve got a lot on my mind/ Like what’s the point of a body if I’ll never be a ballerina!” Dugan and Walker scream at the outset, initiating a spiraling synth part that could soundtrack a nightmarish circus. Those lyrics are but one example of the big imagination on display on The Rubber Teeth Talk.
Dugan and Walker met as acting majors at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, and they joke that they “became friends through being business partners.” When they grew closer in their last year of college, the duo soon found themselves writing an elaborate musical for the fun of it. They’d meet up daily in the lobby of the Marlton Hotel and “running on cookies and fries,” shared songs they’d written independently bursting with stacked harmonies and uncanny melodies. The duo soon realized a single musical couldn’t contain the energy between them and decided to start a band. Over time, Daisy the Great compiled songs and released their debut album, I’m Not Getting Any Taller (2019), and alongside their college friends/collaborators, Daisy the Great taped a Tiny Desk submission video of their song “The Record Player Song.”
“The Record Player Song” blew up on TikTok, then the band released a version with fellow New York pop artists AJR that went certified gold with over 450 million streams. From there, they released their sophomore album All You Need is Time (2022), and a slew of singles and EPs, including Spectacle: Daisy the Great vs. Tony Visconti, which they wrote with the legendary producer. They’ve collaborated with Claud and Illuminati Hotties on top of touring with the Kooks, the Vaccines, and half alive, and playing at Lollapalooza and Firefly. Citing artists you “can’t compare to anyone else” like Fiona Apple, The Sundays, David Bowie, Dirty Projectors, and Liz Phair as inspiration, Daisy the Great organically grew their audience by being totally inimitable. On The Rubber Teeth Talk, tight harmonies and a sharp melodic sensibility are the only rules – every song is a surprising centerpiece in its own right, a reminder that the voice in itself is an instrument.
The textured production and interlocking double lead vocals stun on “Dream Song,” wherein Daisy the Great embrace the joyful experience of tumbling through dream wormholes and
landing in scenarios the waking world can never approximate. Their voices entangled, Walker and Dugan find solace in the uncanny. “It’s about confronting the unknown and not feeling afraid, and hoping you can hold on to that bravery and self-trust when you wake up. There is a party in the song.” Contrasting that party is the downcast “Lemon Seeds,” which chronicles the dissolution of a friendship, the seasick harmony lending the song a sense of intense unease as the duo confront crisis. “You and me feel like memory/ Spit out the lemon seeds/ Take everything you need,” they sing to the lost relationship, their voices melding into one. Later, on “Bird Bones,” the duo grieve the death of a friend, finding the deceased in small things interrupting the everyday landscape. “Bird bones/In the road,” they sing on the bridge. “Shed his skin and eyes and tongue/ Does he know he didn’t disappear?”
Daisy the Great describe their songwriting process as diaristic, reflecting their lives moment to moment, touching on both “big and small things.” To make the album, they wrote together daily, then shared the songs with bandmates Nardo Ochoa and Matti Dunietz who helped expand them into fully fleshed out demos. Songs fell into place as the friends shared the details of their lives with one another, and on The Rubber Teeth Talk, the mundane experiences of the day-to-day share space with the momentous. Daisy the Great dreamed of working with award-winning producer Catherine Marks, and patiently waited a year for her to be available. Marks came to New York for preproduction and the band worked out songs in Dunietz’s basement studio, then they decamped to Studio G in Brooklyn in what they describe as a “homegrown” process. “The whole band came every day, even if they weren’t recording. It felt like such a family. We joked, bickered, and jammed, taking time to find really cool sounds as we knew we wanted the record to be super lush and full of little pockets – different worlds.” Though the lyrics on this album emerge from Dugan and Walker’s individual experiences, they relate to one another intimately, as friends and artists. “A lot of the album is about self-perception, comparison, and insecurity in some way. There’s also a thread about fear and trusting yourself that things will be okay. Trusting that it’s an adventure, or a journey, and finding a way to stick around through the messiness.”
The funky, bass-driven “Swinging” embraces that sense of adventure. Inspired by a time Dugan was administered too much laughing gas at the dentist, the chorus confronts the fear of the unknown: “I’m scared but, I’m swinging.” In the moment, Dugan felt as if she had fallen “down a giant black hole,” and was looking up trying to find the light. The Rubber Teeth Talk finds a vast spectrum of it, bathing the listener in a sense of security despite life’s many uncertainties. Album opener “Dog” boasts some of the most memorable lyricism of Daisy the Great’s career. “My closest kinship with the Winnie the Pooh face down on the sidewalk,” the duo sings, recounting a bummer day trawling the streets of New York. “Tell me the truth, is it all just talk talk talk.” The radiant chorus belies any semblance of sorrow leading up to it. The truth is mercurial, but like dreams, the open-hearted, curious songs of Daisy the Great nudge us ever closer to it.