Teengirl Fantasy

Boasting an almost search-proof name, Teengirl Fantasy is the project of Nick Weiss and Logan Takahashi. Weiss and Takahashi, who craft an atmospheric yet driving sound -- borrowing from deep house, shoegaze, and other styles -- that makes critics coin terms like "dream-beat," met during orientation at Ohio's Oberlin College and began making music together a few weeks later. They put up a MySpace page for Teengirl Fantasy, but it was when their songs were featured on the blog 20 Jazz Funk Greats that they gained an audience. Remixes of artists including tourmates Telepathe and a radically reworked version of Mariah Carey's "Touch My Body," along with the downloadable EP TGIF and singles on Dick Move and Merok, furthered the buzz around the band. Takahashi and Weiss moved to the Netherlands to study at Amsterdam's Gerrit Rietveld Academie for four months, but returned to Oberlin for 2010's spring semester, eventually making New York their home base. Teengirl Fantasy's full-length debut, 7AM, arrived in September of that year on True Panther/Merok. In 2012 the duo returned with their more refined, less hazy sophomore album, Tracer, made entirely without the use of samples and featuring a large cast of guest vocalists including Laurel Halo and Animal Collective's Panda Bear. The following year's digitally released Nun EP hinted at a more kinetic, instrumentals-focused approach on their third album, which was originally expected to arrive in 2014. For their third full-length, 8AM, the duo harked back to the euphoric sounds of their debut. The album, which featured a cameo by Khalif Jones, was released by Planet Mu in March 2017. ~ Heather Phares, Rovi