Avant rap duo Teether & Kuya Neil today reveal their eagerly awaited debut album, YEARN IV via Chapter Music. They also continue to build their rich visual universe with the arrival of a music video for ‘CHANEL’, featuring Alice Skye. LISTEN TO YEARN IV HERE + WATCH ‘CHANEL’ HERE.

Recorded in Naarm / Melbourne and completed in London, YEARN IV embodies Teether & Kuya Neil’s global influences as well as the strength of their connection to local scenes. Based around Teether’s assured, vivid wordplay and Kuya Neil’s hyper-modern production, the record draws you into the heady world of two musical outsiders, raised by the internet, pushing restlessly past sonic, thematic and physical boundaries.

Their kinship stems from similar experiences as lonely teenagers, discovering dark atmospheres through metal and learning to shred on pointy guitars before finding their way into electronic music. Be it discovering The Black Album or chugging along to ‘Master Of Puppets’, their metal roots still influence the ethos that guides both artists today: a deep commitment to community and to finding space for alternate forms of expression.

Teether & Kuya Neil also both grew up as outsiders in suburban Australia – Kuya Neil as a member of a Filipino-Australian family, Teether with Malawi-Italian-Australian heritage. Looking in from the margins of Australian life has given them a unique perspective, a readiness to pierce holes in the aural and cultural fabric of the world around them, and helped shape their off-kilter style in the face of the mainstream.

YEARN IV asks: is this world the one you want to be part of? If not, what world can you create for yourself? When you yearn for what you don’t have, do you strive to build what you lack, or are you just dreaming to reach an impossible goal? Is the very act of dreaming enough all by itself?  To “yearn for” contains multitudes, as does the album. Wild and untraditional, rich and varied, surreal but earthy, jagged but welcoming, YEARN IV makes a new shape for modern rap in Australia and the world.

WATCH: ‘CHANEL feat. Alice Skye’ (Official Music Video)

After their peerless string of singles ‘ZOO‘, ‘BLUSH‘, ‘DIAL UP‘ and ‘SEA LEGS‘, today’s album release finally reveals the finer details of the full record. YEARN IV charges out of the gate with a collaboration with 1300’s Nerdie on opener ‘SCRATCH THE FLEA POINT’, full of anxious wordplay and scene-setting guitar riffage.

‘WAY OUT’ runs on inner-city anxiety but looks for a place to breathe – “the synths are the sound of being underwater blissfully drowning,” explains Kuya Neil. On ‘CHANEL’, whose Phillip Dixon VII-directed music video drops today, Wergaia/Wemba Wemba vocalist Alice Skye features on a poignant lament for Australia’s myopic cultural landscape. The gorgeous, quasi-shoegaze track fades over Alice’s repeated refrain, “I’ll never reach my full potential here.”

Elsewhere, ‘SPIDERWEB’ is a woozy ode to the reluctant and perpetual grind, a reminder for Teether to “learn to say no”. ‘HOTEL’ ponders the passing of time and how we arrived where we are. ‘COSPLAY’, is both a dig at and love letter to Melbourne, the city that formed them. Album closer ‘BIG AXE’ is a tribute to their 80’s metal heroes, “our version of the obligatory long instrumental on every classic 80s metal album,” says Teether. “Sometimes you have to shred.”

Throughout YEARN IV, Teether & Kuya Neil dance with musical structure just as they roast and eulogise the societal structures that shaped them. Ultimately Teether & Kuya Neil find a vivid, unique voice amid a sea of clashing cultural experiences and sonic histories, rising out of the bland isolation of contemporary urban Australia to create something far-reaching and beautiful.