“Our culture is chaotic right now, and the definitions of things are really being stretched and re-examined, especially with young people of today,” Guldemon muses, reflecting on his music’s resurgence. In a fascinating (if only slightly dystopian) phenomenon, there has been a wave of teenagers posting videos saying they only realized they were genderqueer because TikTok’s algorithm started recommending Mother Mother to them. With the song’s now-iconic wailing, staccato opening riff serving as a soundtrack to gender chaos, saying “I listen to Mother Mother” has become equivalent to coming out in many online circles. This year, Mother Mother’s Hayloft was adopted as the unspoken signifier of the nonbinary community. Over the last few years, young queer communities on TikTok and Twitter have taken to sharing their identities through musical code words: listening to Girl in Red is a lesbian dog whistle, while bisexuals identify themselves through the Neighborhood’s song Sweater Weather. Track after track after track dominated the app’s For You Page, narrating everything from theatrical cosplays to elaborate, sex-positive thirst traps to queer soliloquies. After a song goes viral, most artists fall victim to the Internet’s merciless attention span and disappear into the ether, but Mother Mother just… kept going. They weren’t the first band to blow up on TikTok, but their presence on the app was essentially unprecedented. Whether it be thanks to a generational shift, a global pandemic, TikTok’s sprawling network of alternative communities or a sprinkle of that otherworldly guidance that helped them out way back in 2005, Mother Mother found themselves this year at the advent of a mythical rebirth. Essentially, the world wasn’t quite ready for Mother Mother.īut by now, you know how the story goes. Their music was androgynous in ethos, shamelessly loud, rife with screaming guitar riffs and bursts of neon instrumentation labels were confused by the band’s genre-bending sound, and their music was often just a little too weird for radio play. This time last year, they started writing their just released latest studio album, Inside. They started touring, released a couple albums in quick succession, and spent the next 15 years building a relatively small but fiercely loyal fanbase of oddballs, weirdos and outcasts. The new band went from open mics to gigs to festival slots to a record deal in just a year-“It was almost like the universe was really looking out for us,” Guldemond said. Neither one of the Guldemonds were trained singers, but Molly’s “extraterrestrial speaking voice” lent itself naturally to Mother Mother’s erratic, madcap musical style. “But somewhere along the way, I started writing little songs with lyrics, and it only made sense that I sang them.” “I’d wanted to be a session guitar player,” he explains, calling in from his home in Vancouver’s Railtown. When Mother Mother formed in 2005, lead singer Ryan Guldemond was going to jazz school and living with his sister, Molly. Which is why it’s so goddamn fascinating that for the better part of 2020, the title was firmly held by a small, strange, delightfully freaky band from British Columbia. And-in a narrative that’s played out countless times over the past year-it wouldn’t have been possible without video-sharing platform TikTok, where the #mothermother hashtag boasts over half a billion views, and the number of videos made to their songs has entered the millions.Ī viral clip or dance will skyrocket any song to the top of global charts, so to be the most relevant artist on the biggest stage in the world is a position so prestigious that billion-dollar labels continue to battle it out for just a few fleeting days on the trending page. In November, the lyrics to their song Hayloft were the most-searched-for song lyrics in the United States and the second-most in the world. Over the past year, during the pandemic, the songs from Mother Mother’s two first albums, Touch Up and O My Heart, have racked up tens of millions of streams. There was only one caveat: the generation they were speaking to hadn’t been born yet. They were writing anthems for the underground, and they were doing it like almost no one else in the world. The band was Mother Mother, and their independently released music was nothing short of extraterrestrial-they pioneered a soundscape where androgynous vocals wailed over shrieking guitar riffs, and lyrics deftly wove together themes of death, sex, love and decay. Fifteen years ago, in the year 2005, a group of kids going to art school in Vancouver started writing the soundtrack to a generation-it just wasn’t their generation.
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