Interview: The Yours, Chaos in a Cute Package

These Hong Kong natives just signed to Beijing-based label Maybe Mars and are gearing up for an extensive tour of the rest of China. We had a little chat about recording their new album, Teenagarten, with Yang Haisong of P.K.14 fame, and the upcoming tour, which includes playing XP tomorrow (Sep 19).

How was it recording the new album, Teenagarten, with Yang Haisong? Did he have any Phil Spector moments?
It was a rock and roll experience. Guitars straight into amplifiers, instruments were all recorded live, not much overdubbing or special effects involved. We all loved Yang Haisong's approach and that's exactly what we wanted. Making a heavily processed album on which every beat is perfect is not a very perfect thing to us.

You guys have a secret song at the end of "Pink Snoopy". Can you tell us a little about this track?
The hidden track's got a name. It's called "We Will All Be Dinosaurs Tomorrow". We came up with this song right before the recording and thought it'd be nice to have a quiet, subtle song as a contrast to the album. It's weird to put it anywhere else so the most ideal option was to make it a hidden track.

What are some Hong Kong bands, old or new, that more people should know about?
We'd say Alok, who's the producer of our debut album and EP. We've known him for years. He is a sound artist and DJ, and back in the '90s he was in a shoegaze band called Hezi, which we thought was pretty great. There are so many genre names for music nowadays that just seem to be made up.

If you had to invent a name for your genre what would it be and why?
We've been very much about youth culture since the very beginning. So if you ask what kind of music we play, no, we don't play post punk or shoegaze. To us, genres are for record stores and critics. They are terms that describe a particular scene during a certain period. If we have to come up with one, we'd say we play teenage music, simple as that. Our music is for teenagers and people who wanna be teenagers.

What are some things you are looking forward to on your upcoming tour?
We've done shows in China before, but nothing like this. This is gonna be our very first legit tour, a real deal, there's nothing more exciting than that! And we're very excited and honored about joining Maybe Mars. We know that the audience in China may not know very much about bands from Hong Kong, so there's a lot of expectations. We have a lot of expectations ourselves as well, so no doubt we're gonna turn it up a notch or two!

Check out The Yours at XP on September 19.

This article first appeared in the September issue of the Beijinger.

Photo: Courtesy of Maybe Mars