Teen Daze escaped from Abbotsford with his brand of danceable pop songs. Just don’t call it chill-wave.
Teen Daze brings his small-town charm to the rest of the world
Abbotsford B.C. is a small city on the outskirts of Vancouver the kind of place that feels maddeningly close to the big city yet just out of reach. That kind of isolated locale can seem suffocating for inhabitants but many use that as an excuse to make their own fun. Take for example pop connoisseur Teen Daze an early-20s Abbotsfordian with a penchant for earnestly danceable electronic music.
Daze who prefers to avoid using his real name kicked off the project in April of 2010 feeling inspired by the laid-back breeziness of Washed Out. “I was reminded of groups like The Album Leaf and Tycho who took a more chilled-out downtempo approach to electronic music. With the Washed Out EP I realized you could make that music sound dancier” he recalls.
From there he released the tracks that would eventually comprise his debut EP Four More Years and an online star was born. With favourable reviews across the web there was little stopping the small town songwriter that could. Like anything however the immediate blog buzz came with its own set of challenges.
“I found my expectations shot up very high very quickly when it came to my press” he says. “When I’d drop a new track I had standards now and I actually found myself getting disappointed when they fell short. In hindsight this is absolutely ridiculous. I’m so grateful for every piece of press I’ve been given just because I’ve been making music for myself and a few friends for years now. It’s so gratifying to have an audience now.”
Another perceived challenge that faced Teen Daze was the growing “chillwave” genre tag a reductive descriptor penned by the sardonic Hipster Runoff that has quickly become a dirty word. The artist himself doesn’t really care though. “It’s really not my job to convince people of anything. If you don’t want to listen to a Teen Daze record because it’s been categorized as ‘Chillwave’ then that’s what you’re going to do.”
Growing in the face of both praise and adversity then Daze continued to drop a bevy of digital singles and tour the globe all through late 2010 and early 2011. Up next is the release of another new EP in August called A Silent Planet . For this project he expanded the parameters of what he wanted to accomplish adding guitars and working with a celestial theme.
This busy constantly evolving workflow is another aspect of Teen Daze that can be partly attributed to growing up in Abbotsford. “That lack of an artistic culture in the city also dictates my social life; rather than going out to different shows every night I spend a lot of time with my friends making our own fun.”
There’s still a focused end goal for the project however: “I would love to create something that brings honest innocent positivity into peoples’ lives. I see so much negativity in this world and I know how easy it is to counter it with a multitude of temporary fixes. Music is something that has influenced peoples’ lives for centuries and it would be an honour to get to be a part of that history.”
