Known for their enticing vocal harmonies and deeply relatable songwriting, indie pop duo Daisy the Great are continuing to expand upon their dreamy musical excellence. With the release of their new album The Rubber Teeth Talk through S-Curve Records, Daisy the Great carefully balance playfulness with heartfelt introspection, resulting in a body of work that further instills the band’s limitless musicality.
Ever since going viral on TikTok with “The Record Player Song,” Daisy the Great — composed of Mina Walker and Kelley Dugan — continued to establish for themselves a catchy and whimsical artistry fueled by genreless magnetism and heartfelt personability. With two full-length records and three EPs under their belt, the duo now share their third LP The Rubber Teeth Talk, which they will take on the road throughout the U.S. this fall.
The new record directly follows the band’s 2024 EP Spectacle: Daisy the Great vs. Tony Visconti, an experimental and exciting project produced by the legendary producer himself. On The Rubber Teeth Talk, Walker and Dugan continue to bring forward the unforgettable ethereal energy found within their project with Visconti.
Now coming up on nearly ten years together as a group, the new album marks a self-reflective and exciting era for Daisy the Great — one in which they explore their newfound sonic greatness while still embracing their light-hearted, metaphorical roots. Ahead of the release of The Rubber Teeth Talk, Daisy the Great sat down with Melodic Magazine to discuss working with producer Catherine Marks, their songwriting process and what they hope listeners will find out about themselves from listening to the new record.
First I wanted to ask a couple of questions, more so about the origins of Daisy the Great. Your sound is very genreless and so unique, I was wondering how that sound initially came together and maybe who your biggest musical influences are?
Kelley: Around the time that we started writing together, I feel like we were very into Tune-Yards, Dirty Projectors and a lot of harmony-led music, but in a way where the harmony was really complicated or really stacked, having a lot of layers and using vocals as an instrument in ways other than singing the main lyrics and melodies. That’s kind of been our initial lock-in moment, and now we are interested in a lot of different genres and feel influenced and pulled in a lot of different directions, especially just depending on what that song needs at that time and how to best show what the song means and get a feeling across. But we are always tethered to that close, weird harmony that also brings across the emotional center.
Mina: We never started the band thinking we’re going to be an indie rock band, we’re going to be a pop band, we’re going to be a punk band. We never really thought about where we fit within music. And all of the music we like, at least at when we were starting, is driven by the person making the music and the stories. And our music is super melody and lyric driven, so I think that we’ve always built around the story of the song. With this album we did a little more of starting with building up a track, but we usually start with the bare song that is just the chords, melody, lyrics and the harmonies. And then we build around that. Then as we have grown we’ve both gotten interested in different sounds and we incorporate that into what we do. But our influences are pretty vast in that regard. And we come from a pretty theatrical background too, which I think leads to the story-driven music.
I’m glad you mentioned the theatrical background, because you both met when you were studying acting and Daisy the Great originally began to take shape when you two were writing a musical. Do you think you might ever revisit that original musical or do something theatrical beyond Daisy the Great?
Kelley: I love theater. Even when we’re very deep in Daisy I still think of myself as a theater person. I think definitely in life, we will [do something]. I don’t know if it will be that exact musical, but I feel tied to theater in a lot of ways. I feel like it always comes in and out.
Mina: And I think that the more we grow we would love opportunities to build theatrical elements into shows. If it’s not a musical, it’s set staging and what can we do with that. We might do some type of nostalgic reading of the original play or something, but I don’t know. We wrote that probably eight or nine years ago at this point, so I don’t know how relevant it’ll feel, but maybe it’s timeless. I think it’s a great story. There’s also a lot of funny things in it because we wrote it before being involved in music professionally, so there’s stuff about the music industry that’s just not even true and unresearched that we just made up, which is kind of awesome (laughs). I don’t know if you’ve seen “Josie and the Pussycats,” but I feel like that movie was kind of an influence. It’s got this childlike feel that I think would be fun to do a reading of, but I don’t know if we would do it full out.
I mean, once you make your Broadway debut, let me know. Going off of that, you just finished the Ballerina Tour, and your album tour for The Rubber Teeth Talk begins this fall. What are you most looking forward to with those shows?
Mina: New York. I always wanted to play Bowery Ballroom, so we’re super excited about that show.
Kelley: Some of the songs we have played for a while on tour for the past year, some of them maybe two years. Some of the songs we were working them out on the road and playing them. But there is also a bunch of songs that we’ve never played at a show, and I’m super excited to play those.
Mina: This is the first time that that’s ever happened like that. The last album was made-up of songs that we had been performing for a long time. We started the band as a live band and we didn’t put out any music until a year into being a band, and then we didn’t put out the music that we were playing until three years into being a band. This is the first album where we’re actually intentionally writing an album. So I’m kind of scared because we’ve gotten so tight on these songs that we’ve been playing for years and years and years, and it’s going to be really exciting to play a whole new set. I think it’ll be really good and exciting for us. It’s like the difference between riding a bike and learning how to ride a motorcycle. It doesn’t feel like you’re so comfortable in it, but it’s thrilling.
Is there any song specifically off the album that you’re excited for listeners to hear or that you’re most excited to play live that you haven’t played before?
Kelley: I’m really excited for a song called “Sue Me Alice.” That’s the last song on the record and I’m excited for everyone to hear it. But I’m also very excited to play the song.
Mina: That’s like the scariest song (laughs). We haven’t played it with the band yet, but we have done a couple of small intimate things where we’ve done it just the two of us performing and there’s big singing. There’s a scary singing part at the end where we have to sing really high and long, and it’s really crazy when we just play with an acoustic guitar.
Kelley: That’s what I was going to say, I think that with the band it’s 200 times easier. Just the acoustic is so crazy.
Mina: But I’m really excited for that song, too. I’m also excited for this song called “Swinging.” It’s this dreamy, funky, poppy, weirdo song about Kelley getting too high at the dentist on accident (laughter). I feel like the chorus is really fun.
Musically or lyrically, how is this new album different from previous work that you’ve put out?
Mina: I think we had more time. Because, like I said, the songs on all of the records we’ve been making for a while, even though the last album came out two or three years ago, it was pretty earlier influences of us, and I think that with this we’ve had a lot of time to sit in our taste a little bit more and figure out where we wanted to draw from or what kind of sounds we liked. And I think it gave me and Kelley some time to learn before writing songs. We had been performing the album, opening for people, doing our headline tour and also listening to other music, so we were learning from how it feels to perform our own music on tour. The last album was the first album we were able to really tour, so I think that we were learning a lot about how and what we wanted to perform. So I think we just grew up a little bit. Our writing style is still the same, but our influences have expanded.
With so much extra time to sit in your taste and think about songwriting, is it easy to become overwhelmed or overthink the songwriting process?
Kelley: For me, I think that the time allowed me to build more confidence in knowing what I like about production. This time around we worked with Catherine Marks, who produced the record, and my experience working on this record was that I trusted myself a lot more for what I wanted to hear. And Catherine was really, really amazing about finding what makes the artist that she’s working with special, what makes them tick, what they’re into and really putting that front and center. I think the time, for me, was partially taking things in so that when it’s time to make something you feel filled up with creativity. You just feel filled up with potential. And for me, working with Catherine, I feel like that time just led to the feeling of agency and creativity and did a great job of putting that down in the record. I feel really proud of what the record became.
Mina: What I was talking about was not really time to doubt yourself. Because we weren’t writing really actively in the time that we were taking, it was more like we were performing and we didn’t have time to fully sit down and write together but, like Kelley said, gathering inspiration without even actively doing it. We were enjoying music while we were playing music. And then with the writing process we were itching to write because we were feeling so inspired and we finally had time to sit down. So I think it was nice to have that time that where there wasn’t pressure to make music. Because I think if that was the case, I would be going back and forth.
You mentioned Catherine Marks on this record, and in 2024 you put out an EP with Tony Visconti called Spectacle: Daisy the Great vs. Tony Visconti. It was so cool that you guys were able to work with such a legendary producer; what was that experience like for you?
Kelley: That was so fun. We met Tony in Germany, weirdly. We were doing our European Tour and we were playing Reeperbahn Fest and we got nominated at Reeperbahn for this award that was essentially a best new international artist award. It was this whole award show and there were judges, and Tony was the head judge. We met him at that, and we figured out that we all live in New York. He was really enthusiastic about us and said he wanted to work with us, so we started meeting up with him most days for quite a while. He would tell us stories about his life and we would write songs and it was a great experience for going and being super creative and having no pressure for it to be anything other than whatever we wanted to write about that day. It was a very unique experience and amazing to work with someone that’s had such a legendary career. We would be recording in the vocal booth and he would be like, “Oh, David Bowie recorded in there,” and we’re like, this is crazy (laughs).
Mina: We wrote the songs for The Rubber Teeth Talk before the songs we wrote with Tony, so it actually feels like probably the most current edition of our writing style, which is fun. I really love those songs and they feel very free and playful. Lyrically, I think that they’re awesome. I feel like it’s kind of going to be one of those deep cut EPs that people discover and they’re like, “Damn, this is crazy.”
How did the recording process for that EP play into the making of The Rubber Teeth Talk?
Kelley: That recording process was really quick. With a lot of the other experiences we’ve had, it was a lot less immediate, and there was something really cool about writing it, committing to it, putting it down, letting it be weird, letting it be whatever it was, and then building from that. We didn’t change anything as we went. Obviously in mixing I’m sure that Tony was pushing stuff around and finding the important moments within the mix, but we would really commit to it and go, and that was also something that Catherine seemed to prioritize with us. If we like the sound, get it down, just record that. If you’re in the studio, just record it. And in the mix we carved through and let those moments of unique inspiration exist in the record, rather than making it all perfect and then recording that perfect idea. So I think the spontaneity and rawness definitely bled into the next album also.
Mina: I think that trying to perfect something usually takes out all of its charm and takes away some of its voice. I feel like when you’re putting out music and you feel a little bit scared doing it because you feel like it’s not done is probably the best feeling to have, than to be listening to your own music and being like, “It’s perfect. Here we go (laughs).” I think you’ve got to let the things that you feel insecure about shine a little bit, because they’re usually the things that make you sound different than someone else you know.
This album is coming out after nearly a decade of you two making music together. Looking back on your musical journey, what was on your minds as you were making this new album?
Kelley: With every record, I feel like I’m getting closer and closer to being able to record what I imagine. With some of the earlier music, I love that music, but there was always something where I wouldn’t know how to say what I wanted to do in the music. And it’s super special that it is the way that it is, and I think it reflects a mirror of where we were then. But I think as we’re growing, we’re getting more able to capture our specific essence in the music and getting braver about letting it happen, being present, being recorded and letting that shine in the way that is unique to us. So I see this process as growing up while we’re making music. It also feels like we’re growing into ourselves and self-actualizing as artists, musicians, singers and writers, so I think I look back fondly and feel proud of the way that we’ve grown up within the music and the way that we’re brave.
Mina: I think it’s also just believing that what you want is something that you can do. Sometimes I’m like, “This song needs something, but you’re better at this instrument, you come up with it instead.” And I feel like in this record we really wrote together and it felt very within the band. But we’ve always been growing our language with each other and how we arrange songs. I think that this was also kind of a coming back to our roots. It’s like if we made our older music with more wisdom, where we learned a lot of technical things and how to play and what we wanted, and then we also married it with the playful way in which we used to write music by using more metaphorical references than literal references. I also think as we’ve grown, we’ve kind of shed our influences a little bit. I feel like when we started we had a bit of a singing voice that was not quite our whole voices. I think that as we’ve recorded we’ve found our personal voices. It’s like we have built a voice that is meant to be sung together that is a blend of both of our vocals so that, when I sing Daisy songs, I don’t feel like they can be sung alone.
What do you most want listeners to learn from this album as they listen to it?
Kelley: I want them to learn about themselves. I think the best music that I have loved in my life is music that feels like it’s mine and that I see myself in, in a way that feels really personal and specific. I hope that people can find that in the music and that once it’s out it becomes their songs. It’s also a big journey, and in the record there’s a lot of highs and lows and weird pockets. So I also hope they accept going on a little freaky journey in the album.
Mina: I hope they learn to listen to what their dreams and imagination are telling them and to face themselves with grace. I feel like with a lot of the themes it’s a lot of introspection, but it’s also a lot of dreams. And it’s a lot of facing your fears. So I hope that people can discover the things that they might be afraid of and learn about themselves through that.
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