This conversation
Is your confession
And now you’re facing
Your own procession
Los Angeles duo Sleek Teeth plunge into the unsettled currents of existential unease with their latest release, The River. It is a work that fuses early ’90s dancefloor allure with rhythms sharpened into surgical edges, cutting through the haze with startling precision. The result is a release where ethereal beauty collides with human frailty, drawing from electronic traditions while pulling listeners toward uncomfortable truths.
On The River, Sleek Teeth articulate something at once raw and unnervingly direct as they channel artists like DAF, Fad Gadget, and Front Line Assembly. The song depicts collapse under relentless pressure, where violent images of risk, waste, and car crashes crash against spiritual invocations of rivers and blessings. Confession becomes its own chorus, a reckoning staged as ritual. The band’s words sketch the contours of mortality and guilt, drawing out the ways numbness becomes both shield and shackle.
“The music has a sense of urgency, and we wanted the lyrics to capture that feeling, so we wrote them in a very stream of consciousness way,” the band explains. “We wanted to keep it as raw as possible, like a series of flashing images that come in and out, with motifs that paint a picture of actions and consequences.” This approach places immediacy above polish, refusing to sand down the edges of lived experience. Their work mirrors the disjointed tempo of modern existence, where language arrives in fragments, repetitions, and half-remembered mantras.
Sleek Teeth’s use of repetition in both beat and lyric generates a sense of inevitability, as if the song is less performed than compelled into being. An unflinching confrontation with the machinery of consequence itself is laid bare, as the track exposes the cycles of destruction and recognition, holding them aloft as if to remind us how easily one bleeds into the other.
In this collision of imagery and rhythm, Sleek Teeth demonstrates how music can serve as both vessel and indictment. Their art renders the political personal: risk, waste, collapse, and confession intertwine into a meditation on fragility and endurance in an age increasingly defined by its excesses.
Listen to The River below and order the single here.
Formed in 2023 by songwriter-producers Josh and Vox – two strangers once connected by Craigslist, now united in shared obsessions with synthpop and darkwave – the duo quickly found their footing. Their debut self-titled EP, unveiled in October 2024, carried five tracks of industrial thrum and spectral vocals, driven by themes of isolation, mystery, and social anxiety. That collection seeded their reputation, soon amplified by appearances at festivals like Substance in Los Angeles. Each performance added new charge to their myth, signaling a group eager to position vulnerability at the center of electronic composition.
Follow Sleek Teeth:
Featured photo by Mimi Chakravorty
Or via: