Growing Pains – Bottle Rocket
Growing Pains’ new LP Daniel Loves Mandy Forever will be released on their new label home Photo Finish on October 9th.
Composed of Jack Havrilla, Kyle Kraft, Kalia Storer and Carl Taylor —the band’s new LP is an ambitious record made up of songs about desire so all-consuming that it warps the world around it. The compositional scale of these songs matches their emotional intensity. Across Daniel Loves Mandy Forever, Taylor and Havrilla’s guitar lines nod to the intricacy of midwest emo before erupting into clouds of fuzzy power chords, while Kraft plays with the crash-heavy maximalism of an arena-rock drummer. Storer’s voice is a hazy, dreamlike presence, her relative calm amid the turbulence building a gently surreal atmosphere.
“In the past, a lot of the songs I wrote came from this belief that you have to suffer in order to create something good,” Taylor says. His songs on the band’s 2023 EP Thought I Heard Your Car were about a deep infatuation with someone else, whereas “with this album, I had that same type of obsession—but it was over the process of making the music.” To make the record, Growing Pains parlayed six months worth of practise—and dossiers worth of concepts from Storer and Taylor—into a trip to Detroit Lake, Oregon, where they built all these fragments into a cohesive product.
That obsessive approach is clearest on “Bottle Rocket,” the album’s heavy, wistful closer that is being released as a single today.
Storer sings a half-memory of Kraft’s, her voice fading into enormous-sounding, half-pace power chords. It was, Kraft says, inspired by a faint childhood memory of trying to launch a rocket as far as he could, a thought replayed so many times that it has blurred around the edges. “I don’t know if this was a real memory or a dream,” he says. It is Growing Pains’ most striking achievement on Daniel Loves Mandy Forever—an ability to articulate complex ideas by building towering walls of sound around them.
Carl Taylor says of the track:
“This song was inspired by a childhood memory of trying to send a toy rocket afar. An act of reaching for something that can never be grasped. I don’t know if this was a real memory or a dream.”
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