A Band You Should Know: Vancouver's Necking
April 30, 2019 | by Jocelyn Hoppa
The lead track off of Vancouver-based band Necking's debut LP, Cut Your Teeth, comes out of the gates strong. "Big Mouth" is a punk/grunge-inspired track about a guy running his yap:
Fuck me
Tell all your friends you got me
Can't make me cum so I made you leave
It was way hotter in your memory
Comedy truly is the highest form of coping.
Cut Your Teeth as a whole isn't all "I hate men," but a large part of the content resulted from the fact that three of the band's four members were experiencing break-ups at the time. Pretty much the opposite of sullen, Necking was more interested in writing jittery, disturbed, sarcastic post-punk tracks centered on making humor out of the horrors of love.
Necking consists of singer Hannah Karen, guitarist Nada Hayek, bassist Sonya R, and drummer Melissa Kuipers. They are a classic tale of a band becoming a band before they ever played together. Eventually they put down some music and self-released a cassette EP, Meditation Tape, in 2017 that was a "campus radio hit" according to press materials.
Throughout Cut Your Teeth's nine succinct songs you'll hear influences that range from riot grrrl Sleater-Kinney to grungy L7 and bands of similar ilk. Though satire or taunting is used to varying degrees, there's a growing undercurrent of optimism. Thematically, the record's not unlike the moment you realize, after ending a toxic relationship, that there's freedom in letting go and getting to reinvent yourself based on the things you know now. As an example, "Go Getter" is one hot minute of Karen spitting out a self-improvement todo list.
Ultimately, as their drummer put it, "These songs are all about personal growth... 'Go Getter' is a tongue-in-cheek thing, but the lyrics are things we're trying to focus on so we can be good, healthy people."
Cut Your Teeth is about acquiring those initial experiences, here the young women coming together to deal with their collective angst in the best way possible: turning the absurdity onto its head and into a fast and fun DIY record that yields to nothing.
Necking will release Cut Your Teeth via Mint Records. You can hear the first single "Big Mouth" here and pre-order the album at their Bandcamp page.
