Teenage Sequence - aka Dewan-Dean Soomary - is set to release his eponymous debut album next week. Marrying upbeat, hook-heavy indie-disco tracks with biting social commentary, it’s an urgent and world-weary collection of tracks telling vivid stories.
Out now is ‘Tell Me Your Name’, a tale of being turned away from a nightclub due to the colour of your skin. Soomary explains: “I wanted to create a pastiche of a pastiche and leaned heavily into sounds and arpeggiators that one might find on a mid-2000s indie-disco record that itself was trying to replicate that post-disco pre-dance late 1970s sound”.
“I wanted to create something familiar, comfortable, and then juxtapose this really bleak story against it”, he goes on. “I tried to create something that upon further listens becomes quite uncomfortable - because to me that is what 90% of racism is, everyday normal events having the potential to turn into something uncomfortable due to someone else’s prejudice and us being powerless to do anything about it”.
“Like, I have experienced more visceral and violent forms of racism, that goes without saying, but for some reason it's stuff like not getting into a club for no other reason than skin colour that stays with me the most”, he concludes. “I really hope that this song does the other people who were with me justice. I personally think it’s the best song I’ve ever written, but really in this my opinion doesn’t matter”.
Turning to the project as a whole, he says: “I come from a background in explicitly political bands who used music as a platform for political standpoints. Teenage Sequence isn’t that; I simply write about my life, the world as I understand it and as I’ve experienced it. If that then becomes a social or political statement - and I know it does - then it is because my existence is a social or political statement”.
With the album out on 22 Sep, you can also catch Teenage Sequence live at Dream Bags Jaguar Shoes in London on 29 Sep.
