The Teenagers on Myspace fame & Coachella comedowns

COUCOU! WE CAUGHT UP WITH ICONIC FRENCH 00’S BAND THE TEENAGERS TO DISCUSS PLAYING COACHELLA, HAVING THE KARDASHIANS AS FANS, AND PARTYING HARD IN THE MYSPACE ERA. THEIR DEBUT AND ONLY ALBUM REALITY CHECK BECAME AN INDIE SLEAZE CULT CLASSIC. NOW, THEY’RE REFLECTING ON THE PAST WHILE PREPARING TO RELEASE NEW MUSIC.

A gig in 2009

ANOMIE: Hi Dorian! With the rise of social media like TikTok and Instagram, and a bit of hindsight, the era of indie sleaze is being romanticised as a sort of glamorous and feral time. What was the reality of the period?

DORIAN: Yeah, we were really in the middle of it. It was cool. To be honest, it's true that now it's really glamorised and I talk to a lot of young people online who fantasise about this era. We were just having fun, going out, the world was in a better state, I think. There were less worries, we didn't even think about anything really, we were just partying, having fun, touring. That's true. It was a good time. The youth romanticise it, the partying, but I think it's for a good reason. I sometimes feel that being young now after COVID and stuff is probably a bit more complicated. I see all these stories in France, because I still read the papers, and a lot of people are depressed at a younger age, you know, students got depressed during COVID. I think that's also part of why young people like this music, because it makes them feel happy or free or... It's just easier. It was a better time. So it's not romanticised, I don't think so. We were not thinking about the future. We were just touring, partying every night. People were having fun.

ANOMIE: The band's fanbase had a very eccentric party style; it was very colourful and interesting fashion-wise.

DORIAN: Yeah, people were more like... expressive in some sense. I saw pictures of... You know this band, Bass Victim? I saw pictures of a gig and people are bringing back colour and interesting clothes. When I look back at pictures now, everyone was dressed really colourful. People wearing pink, the girls are always wearing neon stuff. Yeah, it was really neon, it was cool. I sometimes wore red jeans and stuff, I wouldn't do it anymore, but...

ANOMIE: Bring it back! Are there any looks that you look back on and cringe, or can you appreciate it all?

DORIAN: Yeah, yeah. I did it at the time. I think now on TikTok, you have things like the clean girl aesthetic. It's all very... yeah, it's just a bit boring. I do see a couple bands sort of bringing fun back, and I don't think self-expression itself has gone anywhere. I just feel like it was more mainstream back then. Honestly, I feel like the whole indie sleaze now is less mainstream than the indie at the time. At the time, there was MGMT... You're from Scotland, so you know Franz Ferdinand? Yeah, they came to our gig, that was cool. Also, I mean, the skinny jeans thing... I wouldn't do that anymore, because I'm older as well, you know. I think we don't want to wear skinny jeans anymore because we evolved in a way that was for us, natural. I remember seeing The Strokes when I was 18 and I was like... wow. The next day, I went to buy Converse, straighten my hair, and I bought skinny jeans. It was a worldwide movement. Everyone started wearing skinny jeans. When we started the band, it was just how we dressed. We didn’t think about it. All the indie rockers were like that. Now, I see some bands trying to recreate it. But... Yeah, it's done for me, at least. Maybe it will be big for young people. People in France, in the countryside, now wear skinny jeans. I also see that in LA people are wearing skinny jeans again, it's coming back in a different way. We'll see... It's not practical, I'd rather wear large pants now.

ANOMIE: A lot of the songs on Reality Check (the band's debut & only album) strike a balance between self-aware and a little bit unhinged. When you're writing new material now, do you feel pressure to reconnect with those versions of yourself? Or do you want to bring something new?

DORIAN: No, we didn't really think about that. We just... I think we haven't really changed that much. I mean, I'm older, I'm a dad and stuff, you know? But I still have the same lifestyle. I play video games, I listen to music, I play guitar. I didn't change that much. Compared to my parents, who were born in the 50s, you know? They were really parents, they were serious, classic. I think now parents are like... a bit more chill. We don't dress like parents, we don't try to be younger. We wrote a song yesterday about the Internet being dead, and not as fun as what it was. It sounds a bit like we're old guys, but I think it's true in a way, it's a bit shit now, I don't like to fight on Twitter. We don't try to reproduce, because the first record... we were 25, we were really just having fun. Sometimes we wrote the lyrics in an hour. We didn't really think about it all that much. We were really innocent in a way in the music industry, now we just do what feels right, it's more natural. In this new music, we're not going to talk about going to parties because we don't go to parties, I don't party hard like I did.

ANOMIE: You’ve said the band began as a joke, do you still use that kind of humour in your songwriting?

DORIAN: Yeah, there's so many serious bands, a lot of bands that take themselves seriously. It's normal, I'm not judging, but I feel that our thing is to not take ourselves too seriously. We always joke about ourselves, because it started as a joke, so it's not a serious project. We're lucky that people like it, we want to keep it fun. We don’t want to be deep, but then for Homecoming, it was this whole... thing. At the time, a lot of journalists were telling us, “It’s like the Grease of this generation, you really understood boys’ and girls’ relationships,” and we were like, wow, okay. That’s cool, but we really wrote it in one night, just for fun.

ANOMIE: No pressure then. It makes sense for you to be representing those people, because you were those people. DORIAN: Yeah. I was a bit angry, because recently, because I saw on TikTok some posts from, I don't remember who, but someone quite big, an artist. She didn't understand Homecoming. She was like, I don't like that my girls listen to this song. It's so... How do you say? Anti-woman, anti-feminist. I was really... not sad, but I was really... she didn’t get the point. When I wrote the lyrics, I was more poking fun at my guy friends, because they always tell you, “ there was this party, there was this girl”. It's fake, you know? Guys always lie, especially. Also, we said the C word, which we didn't really know was that bad. It's a cultural thing. I think in America, it's a lot more like... Yeah, it's bad. Here, not so much. In the UK also, I don't think so. At least not in Scotland, in London, it was a bit bad. We lived there at the time, and...

ANOMIE: Some controversy?

DORIAN: Yeah, they were a bit like, don't say it.

ANOMIE: If you could go back and play one of the tracks you're currently working on to your MySpace 2008 selves, what do you think they would think of it?

DORIAN: Honestly, I think they would like it. I don't know. I saw the stats on Spotify and now, people who listen to us are pretty young. So it's like exactly the same age as before. So it means that the ones from before, they don't really listen to us anymore, they're old *laughs*. So we're still doing music for young people.

ANOMIE: That's cool that you can have that demographic that's still so interested.

DORIAN: Yeah, yeah. I'm really happy about it. It's like we skipped a generation, and I would rather make music for young people than for old parents like me

ANOMIE: Well, that means the music is kind of timeless if you can still have people relating to it now. Especially with it growing up on TikTok a little bit, and we saw Travis Barker posting Homecoming.

DORIAN: Yeah, we have a lot of people on TikTok that do videos on our songs. A lot of celebrities also showed appreciation for the album. When Travis Barker posted the song, it was at the beginning of his relationship with the Kardashians. So I just imagined them listening to that. I was like, oh my God, so amazing. Iconic.

ANOMIE: Apart from a few lines, The Teenagers have mostly sung in English but with unmistakably French delivery. Would you ever make a fully French EP?

DORIAN: No. No, I don't think so because... I don't really like French music. It's like... No hate, but I'm just not really into it. I grew up with American-English bands, Scottish bands... So everything is in English and it wouldn't feel natural to me to write a song in French, so...

ANOMIE: France, funnily enough, is one of the places where your music wasn't super understood.

DORIAN: Yeah, in France, not so much. I never knew why, they just weren't ready for the music. There's a lot of French hip-hop. There's a lot of mainstream, like, pop. But it's not really... indie. Sometimes you see indie bands that play huge venues in England and in France, they would play small venues. There's also this thing when you're French and you sing in English, you're not really seen well in France, I think. Like, Phoenix, for example, it took them years to be really big in France, and they were big before in the US. I think the French don't like that, they feel like you're a traitor. We played in France, but we never played big festivals, and we did big festivals everywhere. I remember one year, we did Coachella, Glastonbury, Reading and Leeds and stuff. I remember I asked our agent, like, can we do this in France? You know, so our friends and family could see us. I still remember, he said “France is the only country where they say that you have to prove yourself before they book you”. Which is insane, because we played Glastonbury, so we're validated by England, but then you don't want us to play in France because we have to prove ourselves. Especially for festivals where it's such a mixed vibe. They can put us at 3 p.m. and, like, whatever, you know? Yeah, I was a bit disappointed. Also, on the Spotify stats again... I'm going to sound like I'm always checking my Spotify stats. I saw that Paris is, like, the 40th city in the list of listeners. Which doesn't make sense... But, if I can add, I'm also happy about it because I didn't want to succeed in France. I wanted us to succeed elsewhere, so I'm happier with that.

ANOMIE: A few of your tracks have blown up on social media, what was your reaction as a band? Was there a group chat?

DORIAN: I mean, these last couple of years... Yeah. I didn't know. I didn't know because I was completely over with music... the first phase of us (the band) ended a bit bad. So then I dropped music, I didn't even listen to music for 10 years. Didn't even have a Spotify account. It was just recently, like a year ago, not even... like eight months ago, I don't know. A fan from LA, we were in touch a bit and then she sent me a message. I think she was drunk. She was like, you guys have to come back, everyone loves you here. I was like, whatever. But she kept sending me messages, she went to a party and Homecoming was playing.

ANOMIE: We often hear Homecoming played at house parties here in Amsterdam!

DORIAN: Really? Oh, wow. That's crazy. Wow. Also with LA, I was really surprised. The girl said she knew these guys, these producers from LA, she really wanted it to work out. At the same time, Quentin (the band's singer) was also trying to get me to do it again as well for a year now. I was saying no, but then she convinced me a bit. I think she told me that The Dare liked us and I wrote to him and he was like, yeah, I'm a fan. After I checked TikTok I saw that there were cool and young people enjoying the music. I think the fact that young people still like it motivated me to want to do it again.

ANOMIE: What's the process with making music for these new tracks?

DORIAN: Quentin is in Paris and I’m in Amsterdam, so I do the music in my apartment. I do the demos and stuff. And then he does the vocals and he's writing lyrics. He sends the vocals and lyrics over and then we send the whole thing to producers in L.A. It’s funny because I really like indie bands but Quentin is really into pop, like he doesn't know indie bands like at all. Really at all. He likes Sugababes, you know, Beyoncé and such. It's good, but he's really not into the whole indie world, he doesn't know all these new bands. He has no idea. He doesn't care. I think it's good because he's not influenced at all by these melodies or this stuff that they do. I think when he's trying to find melodies, he still thinks about Sugababes. It makes a more interesting mix between us.

ANOMIE: You had quite an insane touring schedule when you look back on it, especially 2008, with shows across the U.K., U.S., Mexico, everywhere. Are there any shows that really stuck with you?

DORIAN: Yeah, Coachella. That was crazy. We played at 11 a.m., so we were a bit like, you know, oh my god, we’re playing Coachella. The tent was completely full. Glastonbury was crazy, we played the John Peel tent, which doesn't exist anymore, but it was completely full and I remember being on stage and I was like “this is Glastonbury, I'm playing Glastonbury right now”. For me the biggest was Reading and Leeds because I had watched this video of Nirvana headlining the festival when I was really young. It was such a good and iconic gig that stayed in history. Reading and Leeds was the highlight, to play it was like, completely surreal.

ANOMIE: How do you deal with the comedown from a tour schedule like that?

DORIAN: Well, it was hard to... We didn't have a good manager at the time. Booking agents take a percentage of your fees, so no one really told him to slow down, he had us doing America and then Australia immediately after. He was really just booking whatever gigs he got offers for, it was too much. Honestly, I don't know how many gigs we did in 2009, maybe 200? At the end... within the band we didn't even really speak to each other in airports. Touring like that is not normal so it impacted us. We knew each other back from school and at the end, after two years of touring I have memories in airports where the three of us are sitting in three different places with our headphones on, we didn't even talk to each other. It's a bit like... I guess every band goes through this. Coming back from touring it's quite hard, we call it the post-touring depression. It's something people don't talk about as much but it's like you have such a high in dopamine and adrenaline from being on stage and festivals. The moment it stops, it's like a drug comedown. I think it took me years to really appreciate normal life again. It was quite hard to... touring was so exciting and you’re meeting thirty new people a day and they all want to talk to you. It's like a whole life that's concentrated in a very short moment. But I can’t imagine what it's like for people like Taylor Swift, you know? Such a high that when you're home after it's pretty boring. It's hard to be excited by the grocery store, or your friends asking if you want to go to some gig, and you're like I've seen like a thousand gigs in the past year. It's a bit shit.

ANOMIE: If you did tour again, what do you think would be different about your backstage routine or experience than it was in 2009?

DORIAN: Oh it would be completely different. It would be completely different because Quentin stopped drinking and I drink a lot less. I have a kid and a girlfriend, I think now we would just play and I would have a beer and go to bed. It used to be mayhem, it was insane. There were always people backstage and we took people to the club, to party, to drink, it was a good time. We used to always go to parties with anyone, I would take a cab to anywhere and our tour manager was so stressed, she was always writing the address of the hotel on my hand because she knew that I would forget it.

ANOMIE: Do you have any experiences with meeting artists that really inspired you?

DORIAN: Yeah, I remember at Glastonbury, at the private artists’ toilets. It’s this really tiny truck with three urinals. I turned my head, because guys always do that, and there was the guy from Arcade Fire. We were both peeing, and I was like, hi! He was like, hi. And we were just... peeing. I remember thinking, I’m peeing with the guy from Arcade Fire, that’s crazy. Do you know Teenage Fanclub?

ANOMIE: Course!

DORIAN: I met Norman a few times there, the singer. The funny thing is, he was a friend of our manager and so, for a festival in England, he was our tour manager. Norman was our tour manager. He installed my pedal on stage and stuff, no one recognised him. I remember that some other band, I think it was Metronomy, came to us and were like “Is that the guy from Teenage Fanclub pulling your stuff on stage?” and we were like, yeah, yeah. We drove with Norman to this festival just in his car, the three of us. Yeah, so random, super nice guy.

ANOMIE: For a band built around a sort of adolescent fantasy, what does that teenage energy mean to you now? Is it chaos, naivety, sincerity?

DORIAN: When you look back at it, with hindsight, maybe, it was a bit the revenge of the geeks, you know? We weren't geeks, but we were not the coolest guys in school when we were like 15 or 14. So I think it was a bit like, we're going to show them that we're not these geeks. We were really excited by everything, we were super motivated to make it in music. Then everything happened out of nowhere and it just took off. Homecoming was the catalyst, we put it on MySpace and there were two months when nothing happened, just no views. Then people started to share it, it was really, how do you say, a real viral thing. There was no marketing on MySpace, you couldn't pay for it. It was really just, I don't know, people liked it. We posted it in June or July, and I think in September, there was one particular week where everyone in England started to message us. I think someone from the music industry said, this is the thing. It was organic, it happened really naturally then. On MySpace, you could have a profile song and I think that played a big part, because a lot of people put it as their profile song.

ANOMIE: Was there ever a song that you thought was a bit misunderstood, or was it all up for interpretation?

DORIAN: Well, Homecoming as a whole was a bit misunderstood by some American people already at the time. We received some messages on MySpace that were a bit harsh, you know. Some people didn't get it, they said it was an insult to America *laughs*. Really sensitive. I think if we would release it now, we would have a lot of hate.

ANOMIE: If you released that album for the first time in 2025, what do you think people would latch on to? Do you think it would still be as big as it was?

DORIAN: I have no idea, but honestly, I don't think we would write it the same now. At the time, you know, it was really not a problem to say, “I fucked my American cunt”. I mean, some Americans cared, because we said American cunt. Yeah, I think we couldn't release these lyrics now, I think that young people also like it because they know it was written in 2008. If it was written today, we might have a whole generation of people saying we're horrible. In our new songs, we don't... we avoid... we don't say cunt *laughs*.

ANOMIE: What's your personal favourite song you put out as a group?

DORIAN: Oh, it's hard. I like French Kiss, and I'm happy that now people start to like it because no one talked about it, ever.

ANOMIE: Did making music again feel natural or did it take some time to get back into it as a group?

DORIAN: No, it was okay. It was natural. I think because I didn't write songs for like 10-15 years, so I wrote a lot of music. At the moment we already have 25 demos and I'm still writing songs every week now. I stopped so long that now I have a lot of things to write about, I enjoy writing again. At some point, I'll probably have no inspiration, so that's why it’s good to do all the demos now. Get it all out now. The new songs are more, how do you say, more diverse. There's more of the indie pop that we did, we also have more electronic songs, we’re trying a lot of different stuff. Which is cool with us because we have a lot of freedom. Like no one would care if one song is electronic, I think. If AC/DC would put a different kind of song, people would be like, what is that? You know, like it's impossible. I think for us, I noticed some people think we're indie rock, some people tell me that we're electronic. I think we're free to do anything.

ANOMIE: As the magazine is based in Amsterdam, since moving here, has the city changed the way that you write or listen to music?

DORIAN: I feel really at ease here and really chill, so in a way it probably influenced the music in some ways. Paris is way more hectic and stressful with a lot of people around all the time. I lived in the centre of Paris, so there's always something going on, but in Amsterdam, it's more like... I go to the park and chill. I never went out (to the clubs) once. No, I'm lying. I went once to a club with a friend because he was DJing and I went to a few gigs, but only years ago. When I do go out, it's true that it's a bit less crazy, people have their phones out all the time. They're less inclined to go wild, I see people taking pictures and all this, but we didn't do that... well maybe a digital camera.

ANOMIE: What can we expect next from The Teenagers?

DORIAN: Well, we will release the first song... I don't want to say a date, probably early 2026 and the plan is to release more songs before the summer. So I think we’d like to come back progressively and release tracks. We might do an album, but it's a lot to live up to, because the first album was so special. I've seen an interview of... I forgot his name. He’s a huge producer, and he was saying that every artist he works with is always really scared of never writing a song again that’s as good as what they did before. He said every artist does that and yeah, I definitely have that. Homecoming was so... It was so not written with the single idea, and it became our single. I feel like every time now we're going to try to do a single, it's not going to... It's a bit of a high thing to come back to. We want to play live again, not like in 2008. I think I would be a bit emotional to see people again, you know, like... It's been so long. To see somebody in the old merch, or even to see young people. I see them on TikTok and stuff, but to see them in real life, I think it would be nice, you know.

@THETEENAGERS