Teen Suicide

Nude descending staircase headless

Teen Suicide have created one of the most unique, dense, and impactful catalogs in modern indie rock, yet their new album, Nude descending staircase headless, does something they’ve never done before: it lets you in. It’s Teen Suicide’s first proper studio recording–the rare album that uses a leap in fidelity to propel a group not only to their most accessible form, but to their truest form. Nude descending staircase headless alchemizes all of the personality, nuances, and raw edges that make Teen Suicide special into an immediately gratifying release that’s faithful to their earlier music while also moving boldly forward. It’s an album made by artists who have genuinely evolved as people and musicians, and are now pushing themselves to make the best work of their careers.  
 
Led by husband and wife Sam and Kitty Ray, Teen Suicide have experienced the strange success of many beloved cult bands where the influence of their pioneering blend of scrappy emotional punk, bombastic post-rock, and lofi charm has fully permeated the underground to such a degree that it’s even seeped into the mainstream. And not just Teen Suicide, but the entire constellation of musical projects between the two musicians–TS alter-ego American Pleasure Club, Starry Cat, The Pom-Poms, Kitty, Ricky Eat Acid, and more–can be heard throughout contemporary music, both as key figures in the enduring 2010s bedroom pop wave, and in farther reaches , like their music being sampled by rappers or their raw production techniques traveling the chain of influence to arrive in pop songs. Real crossover success sometimes eludes the innovators themselves, but if Nude descending staircase headless is any indication, Teen Suicide are determined to avoid that fate.  
 
Recent years have found both Ray’s bouncing back from dire struggles with their health. Sam battled a rare lung disease, including a near-death experience (as chronicled on Teen Suicide’s 2022 full-length honeybee table at the butterfly feast) and Kitty overcame a frustratingly mysterious chronic illness, but with those hurdles finally behind them, Teen Suicide were able to assemble their most solid lineup in years and tour more regularly again. The hard-earned stability allowed the core duo to reconsider their approach to the band all together. “I don’t want to just be some forgotten fixture of the internet,” Kitty says. “I started to realize if we took ourselves more seriously other people might take us more seriously too.” Sam adds, “A lot of my reluctance to do that, and even some of my past lashing out, was just out of fear, like ‘what would happen if I really tried to do this?’. But I started asking myself what I was hiding from, even in terms of the songwriting–why take a really good song and bury it? Also from playing more shows again we started thinking about making songs that would be fun to perform and fun for an audience to see. It just began to feel natural to approach things a different way.”  
 
The group followed that impulse into making a new album, and for the first time ever they enlisted the help of an outside producer, Mike Sapone (Taking Back Sunday, Cymbals Eat Guitars, Oso Oso), and decamped to a proper recording studio. “On the older records everything was self-recorded, home-recorded, on a laptop or on tape, and always with really limited resources,” Sam explains. “I think we became known for that but it was also very limiting to be seen as a lo-fi band.” Nude descending staircase headless is many things–aggressive, catchy, intimate, sweeping, and dynamic–but the one thing it certainly is not is limited.  
 
The album’s higher fidelity may surprise some longtime fans at first, but the music itself has some of Teen Suicide’s most visceral songwriting to date. It’s impossible not to be reminded of ‘80s and ’90s alternative rock greats who took hifi recording opportunities and used them not to sand off idiosyncrasies, but instead to proudly dial in those traits even further, and inadvertently landed on some semblance of mass appeal in the process. Across 13 tracks, Teen Suicide at times recall the gnarled pop of The Pixies, the tortured grandeur of Radiohead, and even the tuneful sludge of The Melvins. Tracks like the explosive opener “Anhedonia” or blown-out stompers “Idiot” and “Living Death” are packed with fuzz and downright headbang-able moments, while elsewhere “Candy / Squeeze” or “Spiders” make the most of Sam’s skyscraper riffs, Kitty’s ferocious vocal delivery, and the acrobatic playing of new full-time drummer Niko Wood.   
 
Nude descending staircase headless pulls off a kind of sonic magic trick, sounding at once like a hungry act on the verge of a massive breakthrough and a confident group of veteran artists who know exactly what they’re setting out to do. “This isn't a big swing to do something new and see if it works,” says Sam. “It’s just that so much has changed for us as a band and as people, and it makes this record kind of the start of a new thing.” And thanks to the random viral TikTok success of some of their older songs, Nude descending staircase headless will be released into a world with more potential Teen Suicide listeners than ever before–an unexpected opportunity that the group doesn’t take lightly. “When we played our first show in a long time it was wild to come back to a bigger audience,” he says, “but it also made us realize it would be a waste to not try and do something with that. Bands are making so much music that sounds like it could be generated by a computer now–I think people want something different even if they don’t realize it.”  
 
That desire to offer a genuine alternative plays out in the album’s lyrics as well. Nude descending staircase headless wrestles with what it even means to try and make lasting art as the general public embraces the path of least resistance at every turn, asking how to be a human in a society that seems incentivized to devalue that idea as much as possible. And one thing that hasn’t changed about Teen Suicide is Sam and Kitty’s ability to organically fit these thorny concepts and blurry narrative/narrator lines into deeply personal songs. “The album title comes from a David Berman poem, and I always go back to Silver Jews with how he was able to intertwine stories from his real life into a much bigger world,” says Sam.  
 
Tracks like “Everything in my life is perfect,” “Not born to run,” or acoustic closer “Come and see the clown” tangle with nihilism, addiction, healthcare, and more, weaving broader questions in with snapshots from Sam and Kitty’s own lives overtop of some of the most beautiful sounding music they’ve ever written. “I think to write this kind of music you sort of have to pull from torment,” Kitty explains further, “So many people are tormented by romance but we don’t have that anymore, so our torment is more external. This is what we do, the only thing we know is making music, so the existential perils of these ever-changing machines and systems we’re trying to exist within is the stuff that’s driving us insane when we sit down to write a song.”  
 
Nude descending staircase headless is a testament to Teen Suicide’s surprising longevity and the many unpredictable and often difficult circumstances that went into it. But Sam and Kitty don’t want to just survive the chaos anymore, they want to leave a mark on it. To make a record that might put something good into the world as it collapses. “If you can get everyone singing the same words at a show, these words have power,” says Kitty. “And if you can get those people singing something real–that’s the goal.”  

Tracklist:
1. Anhedonia
2. Idiot
3. Suffering (Mike’s way)
4. Spiders
5. The Knives
6. Everything in my life is perfect
7. Candy / Squeeze
8. Living death
9. Keeping Her keys
10. Hypnotic poison
11. Kindnesses
12. Not born to run
13. Come and see the clown

Pressing Information:
150 Orange Bottles (Magic Circle Subscription)
400 Spiderweb (RFC Exclusive)
300 Hurtful Illusion (First Run Club Indie Retail)
1000 Distant Clouds
150 Black & White Smash (Vertigo Vinyl Exclusive)

Release Date: April 17, 2026