TETCHY

Amongst the highest highs and the lowest lows, Brooklyn four-piece Tetchy craft their expansive and emotional musical universe. A world of whispered hushes that explode into eviscerating screams, and ambient space that gives way to bludgeoning walls of sound. A home to embrace one’s good chaos and to work through bad thoughts.

Tetchy have been quietly (and very loudly) making a name for themselves on the NYC scene since the 2020 release of Hounds. While that five-track EP caught attention from tastemakers including Alternative Press and American Songwriter, the band were also invited to open for some of their favorite noisemakers such as Thick, Crazy & The Brains, and Dead Tooth.

In 2023, they enter a new chapter with the announcement of their third EP, All In My Head, out January 2024 via Trash Casual.

In some ways, it’s helpful to conceptualize Tetchy’s music not so much as creating a sound, as creating a place. A place to radically feel. Somewhere that trauma is laid bare, smashed to pieces and then reconstructed through audacious freedom and unabashed pleasure. Perhaps the defining aspect of the burgeoning Tetchy lore is that vocalist/guitarist Maggie Denning is, in her own words, “someone who has very big feelings.” From the band’s earliest releases, her songs have been repositories of visceral emotion; from unshakeable heartbreak and soul-crushing grief to delirious joy and brazen lust.

The songs on the band’s debut Hounds EP took these emotions and delivered them with an undercurrent of anxiety and uncertainty. The intervening years have seen Denning, and the band as a whole, begin to process and interrogate these emotions. Now they’re ready to spit them back out, confidently delivering through a lens of acceptance, and hedonistic freedom. 

The 2022 mini-album Smaller/Better was a crucial step in this direction. Denning explains, “that album tackled the pain of losing the way things used to be. It was about a lot of the big messes I’ve made in recent years while trying to grow— and still learning to take up space as a person who loves themself.”

Their latest EP, All In My Head, is not just their most musically accomplished outing yet, it is also their most confident attempt to make sense of the world around them. Noting how the path to creating this record was rarely straightforward, but always moved with a sense of a larger momentum, Denning notes, “It came really really quickly and it took forever. It was so easy and it was so painful”. She continues, “these are songs that had to come out during different pivotal moments of grieving, reeling, healing, and expanding. Each moment captures what felt like a massive turn in the road for me— critical divergences from the ways in which I was approaching the death of my father, chronic illness, sexual trauma, and a mindlessly heteronormative path that seemed to be swallowing the person I thought I could become.”

All In My Head embraces these moments and delivers them with stark, beautiful honesty. From the squirrelly and restless “Voices”, that attempts to find a path through the bewilderment of grief, to “Hands” which carries an air of relentless imminent threat as it explores dissociative trauma responses. From the unbridled fury and guttural hurt as heteronormative traits are challenged in “Married” to the EP closer “Psychosomatic”, which harnesses a driving sense of insistence as Denning reflects on living with a non-visible chronic illness and the gaslighting that can accompany it.

At the heart of Tetchy beats the creative partnership of Denning and drummer-now-guitarist Jesse French, who are the two members that have remained mainstays through the young band’s early shifts into the current lineup backed by Kaitlin Pelkey on bass, and Max Goldstein on drums. While this is the lineup that fans will see clambering over stages throughout the nation, All In My Head wouldn’t exist without trusted Tetchy alums Dylan LaPointe (bass) & Chris Krasnow (guitar), whose playing you’ll hear on this record and who bought the bones of Denning’s demos to life.

Ultimately, no matter the personnel, Tetchy is a group effort, a family outing replete with awkward conversations, quiet love, and the knowledge that we’ll all get through this together.

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