Wardrobe supplied by Second + Sea, Lindsey Gardner
Grunge-pop trio Daddy Issues’ debut LP Deep Dream is everything you could want from a rock record, full of athletic, fuzz-blasted riffs, candy-sweet hooks that beg to be sung along with, and sharp, satisfying kiss-offs: “Fuck you forever,” spits singer-guitarist Jenna Moynihan to open the lead single “In Your Head.”
At the same time, the album treats complex and painful subject matter with an uncommon degree of nuance. Using the detritus of friendships and romantic relationships gone sour — an offhand remark here, a discarded shirt there — Deep Dream illustrates the sometimes-heartbreaking tasks of exerting power on your own behalf and making peace with yourself as youth becomes adulthood. It’s a powerful way to use a rock record.
“I think it’s a little bit easier than coming out and saying something straight up,” says drummer Emily Maxwell. “It’s an easier platform — it’s more expressive, it’s more creative, you can kind of say things without saying them point blank — and at least for us, that’s the biggest platform we have to say anything. If I go on my Facebook or something and make a speech, only 50 people are going to read it. But if we put a song out about it, 1,500 people are going to listen to it, or however many actually hear it. It’s a more open and accessible way to talk about problems.”
None of the issues examined on the album are lightweight, from feelings of alienation and diminished self-worth to strong attachments that persist even in the face of breaches of trust. The most urgent discussion is in the track “I’m Not.” Written by Maxwell, partly as a way to work through the trauma of sexual abuse, the song is about feeling small and isolated, exploring the gut-wrenching confusion and self-doubt experienced by a survivor of sexual assault. Considering a slew of reasons why the attack is her fault, she eventually concludes, “You’re so fuckin’ great / And I’m not.” The piece is an incisive, implicit indictment of the ways people who’ve been sexually assaulted are stigmatized and silenced.
“I think if people keep letting it go as it is, it’s never going to improve for anyone,” says Maxwell. “So it’s time to start talking about it and shake off some of the taboo cloak that it’s been shrouded in.”
To give the songs the heft and drive they deserve, the group followed up on a standing offer from JEFF the Brotherhood frontman Jake Orrall (who’d worked with them before, playing a guitar solo on their 2015 cassette EP Can We Still Hang) and enlisted him to produce Deep Dream.
“Basically, we showed him all of our songs, and he was like, ‘Well, maybe you should do this here or this here, or put this noise here,’ ” explains bassist Jenna Mitchell. “It was helping to arrange and shape our sound in a way that we wanted to go for but didn’t really know that we wanted to go for. In the way that he was like, ‘I know what you want yourself to sound like, let’s make that happen.’ ”
The end result is a sonically and emotionally rich album that strikes a difficult balance. The band is serious in its confrontation of cultural issues and feelings, but isn’t self-serious, presenting frustration and disappointment as things you don’t have to bottle up, but can instead feel confident in yelling, screaming and even dancing about.
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