Not Another Teenage Band

Few words have as much cultural weight as 'Teen', yet the band that has —in the vain of Girls, perhaps— called themselves aren't out to evoke all that baggage. Instead, they merely took the name from their leader. “Everyone calls me Teeny,” says Kristina Lieberson, the former Here We Go Magic keyboardist who broke out with her own band, and invited her sisters along. “I'm so used to being called Teen and Teeny that I didn't actually think of how other people would see [the name] until recently.”

Recently, Teen turned out their debut album, In Limbo, a set produced by Pete 'Sonic Boom' Kember, that one-time Spacemen 3 reprobate and recent Panda Bear collaborateur. Though their music doesn't play on the thematic mythology of the American teenager, if it did, Lieberson would have some fine stories to draw on. The daughter of a composer father and singer mother —hence the musical chops instilled in the siblings (Teeny, Katherine, Lizzie) that make up Teen's core— Lieberson's youth was filled with music and rebellion. “I was always a troublemaker,” she recalls. “I went to a performing arts boarding school for two years, which was great in so many ways, but it was also very strict. That didn't suit me too well.”

Lieberson was her boarding school's bad seed, the ringleader of a set of stoner miscreants. “One night I snuck out, took another kid's car, drove without a license, pretty sure we were stoned, went to a store and was stealing hair dye, and we got caught,” Lieberson says. “Luckily, the people at the place didn't report me, because I would've gotten in so much trouble for so many reasons. Driving without a license at eleven o'clock, I would've been kicked out of school for good.”

Lieberson had been focusing on theatre at boarding school, but decided to study jazz in college, figuring it was the only way she could study music in a tertiary setting. “I failed miserably,” she laughs. “I got kicked out of my program because I was just a maniac my first year of college. I didn't go to school. Partied way too hard. Kind of lost my mind.”

Lieberson would eventually find her mind amidst the touring grind; when she buckled down and became a member of Here We Go Magic in its early 2009 transition from Luke Temple bedroom project to functioning rock band. After nearly three years in HWGM, she left to devote more time to her own band. “It was definitely a tough decision, because I love those guys, and I love making music with them, and their last album is amazing, but it felt like it was just time for me to do my own thing,” she says. “I knew that if I stayed in Here We Go Magic, I wasn't going to have time to do anything else.”

Teen found the three Lieberson sisters all picking up new instruments —Teeny had never played guitar before— and fashioning a dark, delay-draped sound indebted to cosmic synth music, psychedelia, and dream-pop; and taken to even more experimental ends by working with Kember. “Pete takes a lot of the lower end, and the bass and the drums, and he takes it almost entirely away, so everything ends up almost floating,” Lieberson says.

They recorded In Limbo late in 2011, during a month long break between Here We Go Magic tours, and once it was done, Lieberson was done with her old band, and committed to her new one. A band called Teen, a band of women, and all the assumptions that brings up.

“I know that we're all women, and that's just a fact. But does it have to come up in every review?” Lieberson sighs. “That's frustrating. I think people assume we're going to make a certain kind of music just because we're four women, and because we're called Teen. Everyone thinks we're going to be some garage-rock band or something. So we have to prove them wrong.”