It is also very much a collaboration between Sam and his wife, Kitty, whose own musical adventures range from the early days of internet virality as Kitty Pryde to today’s forward-thinking pop via The Pom-Poms and her label, Pretty Wavvy. Today’s Teen Suicide is still the indie-rock vehicle through which Ray shares his penned songs. His sizable presence has come to define an era in indie rock and bedroom pop history, where the Baltimore-originating band came to collaborate with and influence micro-scenes across the mid-Atlantic, from the Carolinas up to Philadelphia and New York City. Ray has undoubtedly pissed a few people off-his Twitter presence is particularly notorious-but that openness has become endemic to the Teen Suicide experience. The openness that Ray has, both as a musician and a figurehead, has drawn admiration and consternation across the spectrum of observers, and has proven how listeners crave vulnerability from the musicians they fawn over. Along the way, Ray has pushed the project’s contours into increasingly expansive sonic territory, incorporating emo, noise rock, ambient, shoegaze and more. Consistently, Teen Suicide releases inspire outpourings of emotion from largely youthful fanbases, many of whom have now grown up with the band and watched as Ray grappled with incredible personal turmoil, particularly with opioid use and, more recently, with a mysterious acute respiratory illness. For as many projects as Ray juggled (Ricky Eat Acid, Julia Brown), Teen Suicide/American Pleasure Club remained prolific, dropping numerous b-side compilations independently while releasing seven studio albums and a host of EPs.
Since those anti-halcyon days, Ray has expanded Teen Suicide into a full band, taken the project on tour, and rechristened (if but briefly) the band as American Pleasure Club. At some times noisy and impenetrable, and at others intimate and warm, the compilation represented Ray’s own growing malaise, with which listeners could map the sounds of their own turmoil. The first demo compilation, Bad Vibes Forever, felt instantly relatable. Initially, his band Teen Suicide traveled the post-Myspace internet via Bandcamp and Tumblr as a solo project for Ray, who started writing songs under the name when he was barely an adult. Sam Ray, who fronts the boundary-testing band Teen Suicide, remains as exciting a figure as ever.
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