The Stool Pigeon

Telepathe - Busy Gangnes and Melissa Livaudais - are on a deep, dark, sensory mission to get snap, crackle and pop on your ass. The two women have been friends-lovers-friends for more than half a decade and, in that time, they’ve etched out expansive yet claustrophobic, poppy yet menacing music together.

“She’s my best friend,” says Gangnes about Livaudais. “We were also dating for a while, but now we’re just in a band together. It’s one of the most important relationships I’ve ever had.”

Indeed, the intensity of the partnership hits home with mesmerising effect across the Telepathe sound. Their forthcoming debut album, Dance Mother, which was produced by TV On The Radio’s Dave Sitek, features tense loops and jabbing hooks that come on as though the drum samples are wired up to a buzzing heart monitor machine. And they whisper and chant ethereal, disembodied words that creepily interweave themes of love and killings, violence and bloodied corpses.

“All of our lyrics come after we’ve laid down the music and they serve as an emotional reaction to the sound we’ve made, and there’s something really eerie and dark about that,” explains Ganges.

‘Devil’s Trident’ is the first single to be taken from the album. It features samples of Gangnes’s mum’s voice, who improvised over the track. It’s also the song that perhaps most heavily carries the Sitek hallmark.

Sitek helped bring Telepathe’s inner pop to the fore, Gangnes says: “It was always our desire to give it more of a pop sensibility. The music’s still not structured in a conventional way, but we do think about it a little more literally than we did previously.”

Gangnes also acknowledges growing up in “weird city” Los Angeles informs their music, as does moving to Brooklyn.

“Brooklyn has a lot of hype around it,” she says. “I think it’s positive in the one sense - lots of bands are really open to making strange music here, which makes people more open to a weirder sound - but there are a lot of bands that call themselves experimental because that’s kinda the trend. It can be quite tiresome. We’re definitely trying to make ourselves distinctive and unique. We want to sound like everything but, at the same time, like absolutely nothing else. Y’know, if it’s possible to achieve that!”

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