Indie band The Yours head in a different direction with new album Teenagarten
Indie band The Yours change tack witha new album, but retain some of their core principles
The Yours, one of Hong Kong's top indie talents, have a meet-cute story right out of a teen novel.
Childhood friends Nicholas Wong and Leung Pak-ting reconnected as teenagers, after years apart, over a shared love of alternative music from the 1990s — an era they were both too young to have experienced first-hand. They listed their favourite bands on their ICQ profiles ("a chit-chat messenger" Leung calls it), and found themselves unexpectedly recruiting two eager members to form a new band. The Yours was born. "We loved that Joy Division kind of stuff," says Leung. "And we knew nothing. I didn't even know how to play guitar. It's not really difficult to play punk and post-punk, so we started with that."
It's the perfect story for a band that is self-professedly obsessed with "teen spirit" — not the seminal 1991 Nirvana song, but the actual feeling itself, an effusion of youthful intransigence and hope, irreverence and rebellion. In 2012, after years of growing popularity and a celebrated EP, The Yours released their first full-length album, , to local critical acclaim. The album is both raucous and melodic and tinged with youthful, bittersweet undertones, like the end of a summer holiday. The arrangements are deft, drawing influence from shoegaze, psychedelic rock, punk and post-rock. But The Yours like to call their own sound simply "noise pop."
Two years later, the band is back, with a sophomore album appropriately titled . A mix of kindergarten and teenage sensibilities perhaps, plus the whimsical association of a "tiergarten" — in German, literally animal garden, or zoo.
The line-up has changed to include Wong and Leung alongside guitarist Tim Ng and sometimes vocalist Gwyneth Tang. "She's not playing anything," says Leung of Tang. "She's kind of like our muse."
On the new album, which will be released on July 19 with a gig at Hidden Agenda in Kwun Tong, the band embraces a new sound. On their official website they have a humorous description of the changes. "The Yours' sophomore release sees another linear step in their evolution; nevertheless, is by no means a progressive, sophisticated album. As the title suggests, the 11 tracks are meant to horrify adults and please teenagers. It is still very much a lo-fi collage dedicated to youth culture."
