There’s not much romance in the cold glow of a cellphone screen, but for Boston “bummer pop” band Future Teens, texts and Tinder messages offer as much drama as any love letter.
Letters are finite; technology promises that years of past relationships loom just a text away.
On “Breakup Season,” the band’s second full-length release, the recent past often overwhelms the present as dual vocalists Daniel Radin and Amy Hoffman grapple with the end of multiple relationships. “For Amy it was romantic, and for me it was a band I’d played in for a long time that was a relationship in its own way,” says Radin.
Advertisement
Thursday night, the band kicks off a national tour with Oso Oso and The Sidekicks, starting with a hometown show at Brighton Music Hall. But Future Teens’ live performance and the record itself are more fun than one might expect from an album of heartbroken vignettes. Radin and Hoffman co-write songs with self-awareness and a sense of humor, switching off on lead vocal duties and harmonizing with a hint of twang on choruses that swell with earnest emotion.
The band’s four-piece lineup, rounded out by bassist Maya Mortman and drummer Colby Blauvelt, constantly shifts pace to keep songs from wallowing: gentle, folk-tinged fingerpicking builds into cathartic rock rhythms or drops out entirely to lay fragile lyrics bare.
But even at their most lovelorn, Future Teens don’t take themselves too seriously. Radin started the band as a high-concept joke: At the time, it was just two guys in their mid-20s pretending to reunite a high school garage band that had never existed, releasing songs about teenage topics on outdated mid-aughts platforms like MySpace and Purevolume.
The band only meant to play a couple of goofy shows for friends, but Radin started having too much fun to quit. He’d spent the past few years touring as a member of Columbia-signed electropop band Magic Man while dabbling with his own projects. It felt refreshing to work on something less serious, but he needed a permanent lineup to pull it off.
Advertisement
In 2015, he and Hoffman met via a fateful Tinder match, though the connection was immediately musical, not romantic. “We always say that it’s the best thing that ever happened to us on Tinder, becoming friends,” says Hoffman.
It was a fitting way to meet. Elements of plugged-in, logged-on life pop up throughout both “Breakup Season” and the band’s first album, “Hard Feelings,” in a way that’s realistic but absent from much of pop and indie music.
On standout track “Swiped Out,” Hoffman attempts to channel post-breakup loneliness into a reluctant Tinder spree, opening with a bleak outlook: “I swiped myself to sleep last night/ I want to set my iPhone on fire.” The song’s propellant rhythm adds a sense of determination, but as they chat up a string of unsuitable suitors, the song turns into a sort of lovelorn “Mambo No. 5”: It’s all just collecting names and going through the motions.
“It’s kind of fun to humanize things like Tinder,” Hoffman says. “It sounds absurd, but our daily torment as a person with access to technology who’s also trying to engage in interpersonal relationships or date or whatever, is that [it all revolves] around texting and things that make it really hard to discern tone.”
The rest of the album is equally littered with self-realizations and millennial miscellanea. On “Born to Stay” — a nod to Bruce Springsteen’s “Born to Run” — Radin reflects on his own dating history and past songwriting habits with new perspective: “I was so busy screaming into the void/ I never noticed I was making the choice/ to be just one more lonely sad boy/ missing the point.”
Advertisement
They all make a point of striving for that sort of self-awareness. Future Teens proudly own their emo streak, but when writing about heartbreak, they aim to avoid the genre’s heavy-handed pitfalls. Instead, they turn to each other for what Radin calls “forced perspective,” talking experiences over together to take a step back from their immediate emotions. It’s both a songwriting tactic and a way to ride out tough days together.
“We’re just people who are a) old emos, b) have been to therapy, and c) are lucky enough to know each other and love each other well enough to have this kind of really honest conversation,” says Hoffman. “As hard as it was, writing this record was a form of survival for me in a really brutal and defeating year.”
FUTURE TEENS
With Oso Oso and The Sidekicks. At Brighton Music Hall, Aug. 22. at 7 p.m. Tickets $15 advance, $17 day of the show, www.ticketmaster.com