DRIFT

Drift is a return to form in the sense that it sees Pianos Become The Teeth reuniting with producer Kevin Bernsten (Integrity, PIg Destroyer) who recorded their first two albums over a decade ago. “Kevin knows where we come from and really knew what we were trying to do with this record—and he was down to get weird with us,” Durfey says with a laugh, adding that this was the first album that came together in the studio and allowed the band to explore unorthodox ideas that might not be possible in the practice space.

WAIT FOR LOVE

As the fourth full-length from Pianos Become the Teeth (vocalist Kyle Durfey, guitarists Mike York and Chad McDonald, bassist Zac Sewell, and drummer David Haik), Wait For Love follows 2014’s acclaimed Keep You. Lauded by Pitchfork as “captivating in its evocative detail” and “their best material yet” by Brooklyn Vegan.

Produced and engineered by Will Yip, Wait For Love shows the band reconciling their aggressive past with the atmospheric turns of Keep You. The album eschews stylistic traps in order to focus on songwriting and feels like a full-realization of what the band have hinted at in the past.

KEEP YOU

Keep You was probably the longest we've ever spent on writing a record. We probably spent the better part of two years writing it in between touring. We started going away to Zac's family's house that they own in the middle of nowhere on the Eastern shore of Maryland for a few days at a time throughout the writing process which proved to help our focus a lot. We knew we wanted this record to be different than what we had done previously, but we never went into it thinking that it had a sound one way versus another. The writing for Keep You just naturally evolved into what it was over the course of those few years writing it. We had all grown a lot since writing something as aggressive as Old Pride, and our musical tastes and things that we enjoyed listening to also changed, which was a huge contributing factor as to why this record sounds the way it does. This was also around the time when we started demoing almost everything that we did, so we could look back and decide whether or not something fit the mood of what we were going for or if it didn't. We knew that we also wanted to go a different route in producers this time around as well. Up until this point we had done everything with our friend Kevin and since this record was going to have a different voice they could be interesting to have somebody else do that as well. We entered the studio on June 1, 2014 with Will Yip at studio for in Conshohocken, Pennsylvania. We spent a month recording the record and it was released in the Fall of 2014. 

TOUCHE AMORE SPLIT

While TLLA ended with I'll Get By, we knew this was going to be the general direction of music that we wanted to write as a band moving forward. We wrote the song Hiding in the summer of 2012 and recorded it with J. Robbins at the Magpie Cage in Baltimore, Maryland early that September. The take on recording it was a very live approach and only took us a day or so to get the initial tracks done and three days to complete everything with it. This was a great bridge in between TLLA and where we would be heading after this stylistically. 

The Lack Long After

The process of writing The Lack Long After was started in around the fall of 2010. We were writing bits and pieces of it around touring, but the bulk of it was really in the spring of the following year. We had signed again with Topshelf to put out this record and we entered the studio in August 2011 to record it. This time, we had the most studio time we have ever had as a band which ended up being about 20 days to record and mix the record, which was also done by Kevin Bernsten at Developing Nations in Baltimore, Maryland. This was another record that we were practicing a lot leading up to the studio and things really fell into place probably about a month before we went into the studio when we wrote the first version of I'll Get By.We all agreed that was going to be the bridging sound of what we wanted to do as a band both at that time and moving forward. Kyle began experimenting with singing on this record as well as pitching a lot of his more aggressive screams which got us thinking about what we wanted to do after this record. TLLA came out in November while we were doing our first non-DIY tour which was Touché Amoré's first headline tour of the US. After TLLA was released, we spent most of the next two years on tour around the world.

SADDEST LANDSCAPE SPLIT

While on tour in 2010, we ended up striking a conversation with The Saddest Landscape about possibly doing a split together. We both mutually enjoyed each other's bands and decided that it would be a lot of fun to do. The single song that we wrote and recorded for this was also done by Kevin Bernsten in Baltimore, and took us between six and eight months just to write the song. This will go down in history as the longest it ever took us to write a single song as well as a song that we have only played live a handful times. The split initially came out on Just Say No! Records and then was re-released through Topshelf the following year.

OLD PRIDE

This was our first record with the currently lineup we have to this day. This was one of the most fun and grueling process in writing a record. We were practicing four to five times a week to write the record (which we did in about two months). We already had a summer tour we were working on booking at the time and we didn't want to do another tour behind Saltwater since this was a new lineup and we had new songs. We had enough money to record for around nine days with Kevin Bernsten at Developing Nations studio in Baltimore, Maryland. His discography at the time was mainly focused on death metal, grindcore, hardcore, etc. Our thought was, "well, we aren't really like those bands so I bet he would make a really cool sounding record with that kind of background". So, we went in the studio in May and had the entire record finished and ready to go by June. It originally came out on our friends label, Blackjaw Recordings. We toured that Summer and Fall on it and started sending it to other labels, one of which was a small label in Boston called Topshelf Records. We ended up playing a showcase for them in a VFW hall (an infamous show where Kyle knocked out his tooth and all of our gear stopped working). We signed with Topshelf to re-release Old Pride in January of 2010 and ended up doing a joint vinyl release of Old Pride with Mayfly Records in the Summer of 2010. The record ended up gaining some decent attention around the world and afforded us the opportunity to release it overseas in 2011 with Anchors Aweigh Records and tour Europe for the first time in April of 2011.

Ezra joyrce split

While being on tour for a little bit in 2007 and 2008 we met the guys in Ezra Joyce who we got along with really well. They approached us with doing a split with them which we thought would be a lot of fun to do. This would also give us an opportunity to be able to record some new material with the lineup that we actually had at the time, since the only thing we had recorded was Saltwater and didn't feature anybody who was in the band at the time other than Kyle and Mike. The first song we had written as the new lineup was Creatures of Habit which was an expansive nine minute ambient hardcore song that took up the entire side of a 7-inch. We also re-recorded the song Houses We Die In with this lineup as well. This was also recorded at Mike's parents house in the summer of 2009 and was released through Bear Records as a split 7". 

SALT WATER

Recorded over the span of a year within the University of Maryland recording studios by our friend Alex Champagne. We actually had recorded almost the whole record in a day, but the tracks were clipping and our engineer and we didn't notice it on first pass so we had to start over. That process was much more time consuming the second time around. The plan was to document everything we had at the time just so we could start playing shows and actually had something to give out to people. The recorded ended up coming out on Doomed By Dawn recordings out of Canada for a one time press and then we never heard from the label again. This record was comprised of almost completely different members other than Kyle and Mike. Chad and David joined shortly after this record was finished. 

TWO SONG DEMO

This was the first thing we ever recorded after being a band for about three months. We recorded it at Mike's parents house, with a very small studio set up. It included the song Idiosyncrasies and All Children Make Mistakes, which would later be re-recorded for the Saltwater EP. This was self-released and we mainly just gave it out at our first few shows we did as a band.