Teeth of the Sea – Hive

When in college, I belonged to a subculture of dorm-dwellers that lived and breathed the music internet. In doing so, we, in turn, were part of the global community of nerds that kept its recesses alive and breathing. I was a digital crate-digger: trawling last.fm, rateyourmusic and .ru forums for obscure records, then downloading them using torrent files that took hours to catch a seeder and hours more to download on the unstable BitTorrent clients I liked to use, and finally sharing it with fellow nerds who were also on the same journey. My aim was to find a record that would achieve the curator’s three-fer.

  1. It must be novel. No nerd in a 5-km radius should have heard of the record, or even better, the band. Bonus: nobody’s heard of the genre.

  2. It must be strange. Something about it is off-kilter, off-normal, off-centre.

  3. It must get three-am replays. At least one song from the record must receive replays at three am sessions. And such replays must be recommended and appreciated by the gathered red-eyed nerds, not by the original discoverer.

I don’t know who among us discovered Your Mercury by Teeth of the Sea in 2010, but it smashed all three rules. None of us had heard of Teeth of the Sea until I – at least that’s who I believe it was who discovered the record – uploaded Your Mercury on my SpandexKleenex folder on DC++. Then one night, after B. had played us the video to the Owl by I Love You But I’ve Chosen Darkness, I (or was it B. who had originally uploaded it to his folder, I don’t remember) played A.C.R.O.N.Y.M. by Teeth of the Sea. It would go on to get several three-am replays. It was a strange song on a strange record that had found legs on some corner of last.fm. Oddly psych-y, oddly alt, but not in a proggy way, thank goodness. 

Us nerds have since grown up; avoided the High Fidelity trap of living in a state of constant self-reference and oneupmanship. It was love that did it for some of us. For some of us, it was sobriety. For me, it was not being able to pretend I hated Radiohead anymore. Or Lady Gaga. Or Dandy Warhols. For B., I’m thinking it was when he recommended She Past Away’s Kasvetli Kutlama to raucous laughter. ‘What kind of name is She Past Away,’ I remember saying. It was while defending his recommendation that he seemed to realise that he could no longer pretend that he preferred this music to that of John Coltrane or the Dagar Brothers. I, for one, found the Turkish darkwave band to be deliciously greyscale. But I much preferred Radiohead. Our twin realisations ended the Curation Olympics. Your Mercury is one of the standout records from the Olympic era. 

The band’s 2023 record, Hive, is one of my favourite records of the year. It’s a tightly produced alt-psych rock record. It’s low on lyrics, high on sonic exploration. And it manages to occupy this fairly unique space without sounding like a prog record (thank goodness). 

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