Indie-Con 2024: A Case Study On Teen Jesus And The Jean Teasers’ Boundary-Breaking Debut Album ‘I Love You’

It’s certainly been an eventful past couple of years for punk band Teen Jesus And The Jean Teasers. After building a dedicated fanbase across a decade, the team released their debut album last year to great success – and being a support act for the Foo Fighters is a nice bonus! At Indie-Con 2024, Teen Jesus were made a Case Study example of forming a debut album and its accompanying marketing campaign.

Teen Jesus released their debut album, I Love You, in October 2023. Not only did the album peak at #6 on the ARIA Charts, it has also reached over 13 million streams. At the 2024 AIR Awards, the Canberra group won Best Independent Rock Album or EP. One the band’s songs, I Used To Be Fun, was also named Independent Song of the Year. The album’s producer, Oscar Dawson, was also nominated for Independent Producer of the Year, and label Domestic La La was nominated for Independent Marketing Team of the Year.

The audience at Indie-Con celebrated an all-girl band being discussed and represented by ladies in the music industry. Speakers on included Teen Jesus’ publicist Genna Alexopoulos, manager Ash Hills, Mardi Caught of The Annex, and Spotify representative Vanja Bezbradica.

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Building from the excitement around releasing a debut album, moderator Kate Lawerence (of the UNIFIED Music Group) asked the speakers about the creative process for putting together I Love You. “I think one thing that's quite interesting about the band that people may not know is that the way they write is a little bit different to other bands,” said Hills. “They all write individually and we used that to market the album and the songs that each of them had either written individually or really felt connected to.”

In a further elaboration, Alexopoulos mentioned how the band already had an established fanbase from their previous EP releases, which helped gradually moved towards the album. Caught celebrated all the team members putting together the strategy: “We keep saying the C word – collaboration. I can't stress to everyone enough. You can have plans, but if you have plans together, they're going to be amplified and even better.”

Teen Jesus were also featured as a Spotify Radar Artist for the Australian and New Zealand region. Bezbradica discussed the approach from the various teams representing Spotify and Teen Jesus to unify the music, especially when performing at Spotify House. “Spotify has gone through about almost 800 Radar artists, but every market has their own version of the programme,” she said. “It all starts with the music. As the music team, we're keeping on top of what's going on in the industry through all our partners, through different distributors and labels, paying attention to what's going on platform for the artist if we're seeing growth. It definitely felt like an amazing collaboration, communication, and trust.”

When discussing the marketing campaign for I Love You, Hills described an approach to personalising the band and the individual members. “We wanted to take a bit of a lo-fi approach, and we just really wanted this campaign to be all about the band and people feeling like they were a part of it,” she said. “The reference that I kept giving was the Spice Girls – you associate with you're either a Sporty Spice or a Baby Spice. We want their fans to be like, ‘I'm a Neve, I'm an Anna, I'm a Scarlett, I'm a Jaida.’”

Hills also mentioned how Dawson recorded the band on the road with a $400 camcorder. Drummer Neve van Boxsel edited the footage into music videos, continuing to add a personal and homegrown touch to the band’s identity. “Music videos don't need to cost you thousands of dollars. There are ways you can do them really creatively on a low budget,” she noted. “Those videos were so raw and straight to the point, it meant that their personalities could really shine through, which is a really great way to add to all of the storytelling around the record.”

One audience member, an up-and-coming musician, asked about the best strategy for which song to release as an album’s lead single. The speakers made strong suggestions for which songs to select and how to release subsequent singles. “At the end of the day, you just have to follow your gut with what song speaks to you, because you know the people who engage with you as a musician,” says Alexopoulos. “In terms of the time between [a lead single release and an album release], I'm a big fan of an eight-to-ten-week gap. You're not overloading people. From a press perspective, they can support it. From a radio perspective, they can support it.”