Take A Bite

Back in their early days Baltimore outfit Pianos Become The Teeth, drawing influences from hardcore and post-rock music, were immediately thrown into the same stylistic pool as Touche Amore, La Dispute and others. Whilst those bands are standouts in their own right, the half-joking label of “The Wave” didn’t really allow Pianos Become The Teeth too much room to move around in establishing their own style. Now, with their third long-player, Keep You, Pianos Become The Teeth are looking to break that perception.

“This album came together kinda differently than [2011’s The Lack Long After] did, and I think that’s pretty obvious through the way it sounds,” explains guitarist Mike York. “The last album was basically a process of us coming up with a bunch of riffs that we were all stoked on. We were listening to a lot of heavier stuff at the time, but basically me or Chad [McDonald, fellow guitarist] would get together and write a few riffs, bring them to band practice and then flesh it out. But I think this record was much more of a group-think type thing, where we’d go to practice and everybody would have these very integral ideas, and everybody was equal in how the album was built.”

The result is something far from what fans might have been expecting in a follow-up. While still harbouring a lot of post-rock aesthetics – technical guitar passages, a keen walking of the line between loud and quiet – Keep You has seen the band forego the screamed vocals and heavier sections that kept them in “The Wave”. They’ve instead embraced melody and quaint substance in their music, creating something that’s arguably much more atmospheric.

“You know, with the last two albums, Chad didn’t really have a job,” York laughs. “He’d sit in his room and play guitar all day, and I’d come over after college and he’d be like, ‘here’s these riffs I’ve written,’ and then we would mess around with those for a while. We just wanted to play and go on tour, and we didn’t really think much more into it than that. I think with Keep You, we’ve taken it much more seriously. I mean, I don’t think it was this conscious thing of, ‘Oh, let’s all write this album together’ or anything. I think it just happened that way. I don’t know if that’s us getting older or being more responsible, but we definitely had this feeling of wanting to do something more than we have done in the past.”

Along with that feeling of ageing sobriety is the urge to step out of the shadows of their contemporaries, something that definitely pushed the process of the album. “I mean, we could have done something like the previous albums, but for both us and the fans I think that would have been totally boring. We want to do something different, and we want to do it properly, you know? We’re still all working our day jobs and waiting until we can quit our day jobs,” York laughs. “That’s the dream.”