Converging sounds and influences from the far-reaches of the internet, Teether and Kuya Neil have created a world that is distinctly theirs on YEARN IV.
There’s a sense you’re hanging out with them – sitting around listening to random tracks on SoundCloud or spending time at the beach – the music a product of that freedom and time to mess around and create. They’re just doing their own thing, without feeling the need to deliver or conform to what rap in so-called Australia should sound like.
YEARN IV marks their first release since Teether moved to the UK, having both met and made music in Naarm since 2020. Both grew up as outsiders in suburban Australia, with Kuya Neil being a member of a Filipino-Australian family, while Teether has Malawi-Italian-Australian heritage. While their previous release STRESSOR encapsulated inner-city anxiety, YEARN IV expresses a more tender and intimate edge – a yearning, if you will.
It’s this sentimentality that you hear on ‘Blush’, a breakbeat-driven love song which begins with a sense of optimism, but eventually leads to a feeling that it won’t last long. The track was one of the first they wrote while on a recording trip away from the city, “The sun was out and we didn’t have to go to our day jobs for a bit so we were feeling it. But you know at the start of a trip when you are aware it’s going to pass you by quickly?” Teether says of the track.
There’s also club-like energy to some of the tracks: The footwork-influenced ‘Way Out’ has a breezy, escapist feel to it, while ‘Scratch The Flea Point’ featuring Nerdie of 1300 is evocative of an early 00’s action film soundtrack (I can’t stop thinking how it reminds me of Paul Oakenfold’s ‘Ready, Steady, Go’, which was the go-to score for seeing some crazy shit on screen in that era).
Other tracks take on a more brooding quality, but aren’t fixed to a particular sound or genre. ‘Chanel’ featuring Wergaia/Wemba Wemba vocalist Alice Skye has a dream-pop flavour, while ‘Sea Legs’ and ‘Bullet Point’ feel inspired by lo-fi hip hop and cloud rap. It’s not easy to summarise their sound, and maybe that’s the point.
“I’ve always felt like it's hard to know where to place us, and I know people have found it hard to know what to make of us,” Teether told RRR back in March. “But I always felt with us, in our peers, there’s not really been anything for us to draw from, in what we’re trying to do in this space. I’ve always felt like for us to be ourselves and open up a new realm for us to exist is the only way to do it – because there’s nowhere we could really slot in.”
Words by Johnny Lieu