Teether & Kuya Neil, Photograph by Phillip Dixon
Teether and Kuya Neil both grew up in the suburbs. Bored. Alone. And monomaniacally focused on music.
This shared experience goes some way towards explaining the unflinching experimentation that’s at the heart of the duo’s work. Teether & Kuya Neil have been making music together for half a decade now, culminating in their debut album YEARN IV. But their work remains near-impossible to categorise.
Teether is a cool-headed rapper and songwriter who started out fronting progressive metal bands before turning his attention to lo-fi hip hop and outsider indie rock. Kuya Neil is a footwork obsessed producer and DJ whose label, CONTENT.NET.AU, has put out music by Sevy, BAYANG (tha Bushranger) and ZK king.
The two musicians were already established figures in the Naarm underground before releasing their debut EP as a duo, God of Surprises, in early 2021. The folks at Chapter Music – the legendary indie label that’s released albums by Dick Diver, Laura Jean, Andras & Oscar and Primitive Calculators – were instant fans and put their weight behind Teether & Kuya Neil’s next project, the long-playing mixtape GLYPH.
A week after GLYPH’s November 2021 release, Teether & Kuya Neil performed a 30-minute set on Triple R FM, beaming into the studio from a Richmond rehearsal room. I had the radio on at home and was struggling to fathom what I was hearing. Was it hip hop or dance music? Boom bap or electro? Dean Blunt or Armand Hammer? Angry, playful, political or surrealistic?
Midway through the performance Teether said, “What song could be next? It could be anything. Who knows?” And this pretty much sums up how it feels to listen to YEARN IV, which came out through Chapter Music at the start of May.
Much like GLYPH and 2023’s STRESSOR, YEARN IV is characterised by the duo’s willingness to smash together disparate genres to create something strange and unique. Shades of metal, shoegaze, 90s pop and lovesick cloud rap expand the palette, while the hyperkinetic aesthetics of Chicago footwork continue to wield a major influence. Alice Skye, Stoneset and 1300‘s Nerdie all make guest appearances.
Teether’s voice holds the whole thing together. He’s monotonous and unfazed, but also deftly melodic – and rarely has anyone sounded so good singing through AutoTune. The lyrics are a maze of cultural references and city dwelling-observations, touching on themes of racialised othering, economic disenfranchisement, suburban malaise and Smith’s Original Chips.
I spoke to Teether – the stage name of Josh Chisenga, who’s now based in London – and Kuya Neil – aka Neil Cabatingan, who’s holding it down in Naarm – over Zoom to learn about their origins, their creative partnership and the songs on YEARN IV.
Origins
Kuya Neil: I started off playing guitar as a teenager. I didn’t learn electronic music production until my early 20s. I always loved electronic and hip hop, but I mainly played in bands. Then when I moved to Melbourne, I didn’t have the same friend circle anymore and my taste was changing. I was basically just trying to make hip hop.
Teether: For me it started with thrash metal. When I was eight or nine, that was the first time I heard Ride the Lightning and Master of Puppets and The Black Album and I was like, “OK, I need to get a guitar.”
Kuya Neil: When I started getting more serious into it, it was Chicago footwork music. That was the style that I really wanted to master and make and I spent a long time just quietly in my room trying to emulate Chicago footwork music.
Teether: I started writing music pretty quickly – I think was 11 or 12 and I just started writing original songs in Guitar Pro. I had a band from high school until I was about 20. It was called Eritherium. It was like an Opeth worship thing basically, ten minute songs and shit. We dropped three albums and I wrote all of them when I was in high school.
Growing up in the suburbs
Kuya Neil: I grew up in Hastings, which is in the Mornington Peninsula, further down south of Frankston. There’s rock music there and there’s pockets of people who like stuff, but I always wanted to move to Melbourne because there was just more of a scene for different styles.
Teether: Similar story to Neil but I was in Doncaster instead of Hastings. The suburbs are, like, unremarkable in so many ways. It’s just a fucking servo and cunts playing footy across the road.
Kuya Neil: That’s what gives you an imagination, I think. Boredom is one of the best things for you. Like, I grew up in a really boring place.
Teether: Yeah, same.
Kuya Neil: There wasn’t much going on and there wasn’t much for me, creatively. So I had to have a really strong imagination and be content with playing guitar in my room. That had to be enough.
Teether: And it was.
Kuya Neil: That’s what we’re like with music – we’re content just making it. It’s a huge blessing to get to do it. Everything else is kind of a bonus.
Working together
Teether: We met in about 2014 and we never wrote a song together until 2020. I’d been aware of what Neil was doing and I was doing my thing, trying to figure out my sound or what I wanted to dabble in or where I wanted to go.
One day we linked up and we made “Lamp” off our first little EP. From the start it’s always worked. It’s been easy.
Kuya Neil: The project definitely pushes me to experiment and try new things because Josh is so open to everything and it opens me up to feeling like, “Oh, OK, we can do that and it’s not out of bounds.”
Teether: I love when it’s some shit that I never expected. I think that’s how we know a track is good. If we’re making some shit, if someone’s playing something on guitar and Neil adds some shit to it, usually we’ll just be like, “Woah, let’s lean into that, see where it goes.” I just always find the pocket.
Kuya Neil: I used to think that we’d get to a point where there’s a certain kind of beat that I would make for our songs. There are certain tempos that I think we’re comfortable in – like, we are comfortable at 160 and 80 BPM; that footwork-y driving tempo works for us – but it has to evolve and become something else.
The songs on YEARN IV
“SCRATCH THE FLEA POINT” (feat. Nerdie)
Kuya Neil: Josh and I have bonded over liking Metallica a lot and Josh said that this felt like a Metallica song. That was the first time me and Nerdie properly hung out. We were at my studio and he was just mucking around on guitar. He didn’t even take what we were playing very seriously, but I was like, “No, this is great.”
Teether: It just kind of came out real quick. No one was really thinking too hard about it.
Kuya Neil: We always like to start a project with a driving sort of song that sets the pace of where we’re going. So, with “SCRATCH THE FLEA POINT,” combining the metal influences and also a lot of the dance music influences – like a lot of the breaks and house music influences that are throughout the record – it was just a perfect blend of those two things.
“COSPLAY”
Teether: We made that in Sydney. We had access to a studio for once because Neil was doing some production stuff for another artist, so they let us use the space for three days. That was the first one we did and we were like, “Cool, this is the new sound.”
Kuya Neil: The only two tracks that were made in Sydney were that and “BULLET POINT.” At that time we were super sleep-deprived and we made the call, like, “Should we go to sleep or should we just take dexies and go to the studio?”
Teether: We gotta take dexies.
Kuya Neil: So we were there till three or four in the morning. I feel like I was losing my mind. But those were really nice spaces to work in; treated rooms, it felt flashy.
“CHANEL” (feat. Alice Skye)
Kuya Neil: Sometimes I just get a visual thing in my head and I was really fixated on the Natalie Imbruglia “Torn” video when I was listening to the track.
Teether: I thought it sounded like a black metal riff and then you added the drums and it was like, “This is completely different now.” We were also thinking it sounded like 80s Steve Vai. But overall we were like, “This is, like, real 90s/00s Australiana.” Like, it must be in us somewhere – we’ve consumed enough of that that it came out unintentionally.
Kuya Neil: It had that energy and then I think Alice is an artist who captures that in a really strong way. Her music feels like it’s rooted in that sound as well as her own influences. That was the brief as well for the music video: I told Phil [Dixon VII] I want it to feel like domestic Australia, suburban. I think the lyrics reflect that bored at home, living in the suburbs kind of feel.
Work ethic & community
Teether: I feel like we just need to make music. Like, what else would we do? Everything that we have made, it’s all just people that we’re friends with and we fuck with and one day we’ll just be in a room and be like, “We both make music. Let’s make some music right now. OK, cool, that’s a good song.”
Kuya Neil: With CONTENT.NET.AU, I’m just trying to put my energy into the things I care about. I take it seriously as well – I want everyone around us who’s making good work who we care about to do well and I want people to hear their music.
Teether: It’s good having people like Neil that do facilitate spaces for people to be themselves because I know cunts don’t really put themselves out there. I would just be in my room. It would be hard to be constantly like, “You need to listen to this record.” It’s great that Chapter are able to give us that platform, that CONTENT exists, and everyone can combine forces and do shit.
Kuya Neil: Sometimes in the more underground scenes there can be a fear of pushing your music, promoting it, wanting it to be something more. A lot of the people we’re friends with, they’re not people who like drawing heaps of attention to themselves. But often they’re making really important music or pushing an idea or an ethos that I think is important for people to be exposed to.
