Magic Of The Sale is the second album by Texas’ Teethe. I haven’t heard the debut yet, so I went into this record completely blind. Slowcore is a genre built around wistful, restless songs to lay awake spiralling to and that’s a feeling Magic Of The Sale bottles and captures at its most pure and occasionally hopeful.
The record opens with ‘Tires & Bookmarks, lulling you in with a sleepy cut of gentle slowcore. Softly strummed chords and weeping slide guitar create a soothing whirl like the closing of weary eyes. It’s a really comforting opening to the album, setting up a dream-like haze that hangs above the record like a fine mist. It sets up the next track – the title track, ‘Magic of the Sale’ – to establish the louder end of the album’s sound, with the chorus introducing a soaring lead line that feels like it resonates inside of your skull. It helps lift this subtle but incredibly catchy chorus out of the soothing lull of the verses. Between these first two tracks the album quickly gave a feeling of insomnia, balancing between sleepy and sleepless somewhere on the cusp of dream and delirium. It’s the kind of music you put on when you’re lying awake, desperate to sleep if only you could just hush your brain for five minutes. The droning voice that ends the song adds to this, with the feedback and hum of the guitars giving way to distant choral vocals that gently tuck the song in, like a parent carrying you upstairs when you fell asleep at the New Year’s party. Back to bed.
‘Anywhere’ picks up from the twilight of the previous track with calm arpeggiated guitar, slowly coalescing into a warm current that is like a crude clay figure of a chorus. That might sound like a criticism, but it’s not – when the song nears its end, that initial sketch is fully realised. It’s songwriting that isn’t afraid of being subtle and taking its time. The song takes a lot of notes from dream pop and the end result is a track that focuses on enveloping you in a feeling more than anything.
‘Push You Forever’ has another of the strongest choruses of the record. The hooks on this album often sort of just appear out of the fog, like images manifesting in TV static or the figures your brain makes out of the shapes in your dark childhood bedroom. On this song though, the flow stutters before crashing back in with this glacial refrain that’s like watching huge tidal waves crash or ice sheets fall in slow motion.
‘Holy Water’ is by far the loudest song on the record. It opens with this heavy barrage like a passenger jet taking off. I guess the reason I use that analogy is because the easiest reference point I have is Duster’s ‘Earth Moon Transit’, which is probably my favourite Duster track. The defining lead line above the blistering guitars immediately called that song to mind, which from me is never an insult. The verses contain probably the catchiest songwriting of the lot, with this syrupy sweet vocal melody and the most conventionally indie-rock instrumental you’ll find here. If you’re keeping track of my insomniac narrative here, this is probably the point where you cave to your impulsive thoughts and pick your phone up, accepting that sleep is still a long way off.
‘Iron Wine’ starts off with the band’s – and genre’s – signature floating lullaby sound before introducing droplets of the crushingly dense guitar tone from the previous track, with the contrast making it feel even heavier here. It sits in a section of the record that works to guide you back down after the bolt awake of ‘Holy Water’. This section has also got ‘Funny’, which houses a really lush slide guitar lead line/solo. ‘Build & Crash’ has a stop-start of the chorus and a great bassline that worms its way in sometimes that have stuck with me. These vocals – between this track and Holy Water’ – add such a different flavour that mark some of my highlights of the record.
The run of ‘Hate Goodbyes’ to ‘Matching Durags’ sees sleep finally come. ‘Hate Goodbyes’, shakes off the last throes of energy with biting guitars trying to keep their claws in, but only having the energy for short gasps, overwhelmed by breathy vocals and soft acoustic strums. Slide guitar is one of my favourite parts of this album and here it really feels like the waning of the album, and ‘Hate Goodbyes’ wanes straight into ‘Make It Red’. Here, the vocals feel more tired and distant than ever, the guitars warm, close like a weighted blanket and the drums just slowly dropping off. It barely lasts two minutes before falling into the lucid drone of ‘Matching Durags’. That ends the record with hissing silence. No more thoughts, you can finally get some rest.
I really liked this record as a mood piece. For me, I don’t know how many of these tracks I’d listen to outside of a long play – ‘Magic Of The Sale’, ‘Push You Forever’, ‘Holy Water’ and even ‘Hate Goodbyes’ sure – but the rest feel like tracks not made for shuffle play or playlists. This is an album with a cohesive feeling; I can’t take credit for the sleepy/sleepless analogy that has been the loose throughline of this review because it’s just something the album made me feel. The sequencing here is perfect and if you’re spending a late night struggling to sleep, this album is a solid companion.
Teethe: Magic of the Sale – Out 8 August 2025 (Winspear)
– Push You Forever (Official Video)
