New Music: Teen Jesus and the Jean Teasers

We're shining a spotlight on the best new Australian artists set to dominate 2020. Welcome your new fave gritty-grunge girl gang from Canberra Teen Jesus and the Jean Teasers.

Check out the rest of our New For 2020 list!

Ticketmaster New Music is your one-stop destination to discover the best emerging live acts before they explode. These are the artists we’re expecting to make waves in the live music scene, and we want you to know about them first.

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Canberra grunge revivalists Teen Jesus & The Jean Teasers are exactly what you need for a good dose of nostalgia without needing to take a trip back in time.

Taking inspiration from your favourite 90’s grunge bands while injecting their songs with a healthy dose of pop flair and unstoppable energy, you’ll be hard-pressed to get these gritty, catchy tunes out of your head any time soon.

Formed in 2015 (during a sleepover viewing of School of Rock no less), Teen Jesus and the Jean Teasers rapidly built up a name for themselves throughout Canberra after coming up through triple j Unearthed High. Soon after they were sharing stages with the likes of Polish Club, Bleeding Knees Club, Northeast Party House, Alex Lahey, Press Club, Spiderbait and Slowly Slowly – gathering their own legion of dedicated fans ready to spread the Teen Jesus love around.

2018 saw the band take a break to finish up their schooling, and upon returning they shrugged off the power-pop sound of their earlier releases, diving headfirst into the 90’s alt-rock sound that saw them named Best Live Act in ACT at the 2018 National Live Music Awards.

This new sound can be found on their two most recent singles, ‘I Like That You Like That’ and ‘See You In A Bit (I Still Care)’. Packed full of catchy hooks, chugging guitar lines, and injected with a healthy dose of spunk – this is the girl gang we are all lining up for a membership to join.

More recently, they’ve made the rounds of our festival calendar, with slots at Lost Paradise, Spilt Milk, Stonefest, Groovin’ The Moo, Bigsound, and Laneway Festival all under their belts.

Along the way, Teen Jesus & The Jean Teasers have built up an ever-growing cult following, and since we can’t get their latest pair of singles out of our heads, we’ve handpicked them as one of our New For 2020 artists to watch.
teen jesus new for 2020

The Story

From the beginning

Teen Jesus and the Jean Teasers: “We started making music in Neve’s (van Boxsel – drums/backing vocals) living room in year 10. It was the morning after a sleepover; we had watched School of Rock the night before and decided that we needed to start a band as soon as possible. Two of us had never played our instruments before and none of us had been in a real band. We looked up some chord diagrams and the chords to ‘Big Jet Plane’ by Angus and Julia Stone and almost four years later here we are.”

What you’ll hear

“Our sound is a mix of many different teenage phases and genres, but we’d say it’s in the alt-rock family. We have tried so many different versions of our sound throughout the band’s life, including years of trying to be a power-pop inspired band when we had a keyboardist and Anna (Ryan – vocals) didn’t play the guitar as well as singing. But finally one has developed that we are all super happy with. Although we still do have a cheeky power-pop influence we definitely have become a lot harder over the past year or so. Like a barbed wire fence but it has sparkles on it.”

Influences & inspiration

“Our list of inspirations is endless but we’ll think of a few spicy ones. Some of our favourite bands are WAAX, Wolf Alice, Courtney Barnett (not a band but she’s an angel so we’ll look past it), Sly Withers, The Strokes, Press Club, Pixies, Sonic Youth. We love gluten but mainly because Scarlett (McKahey – guitar/backing vocals) can’t eat it. Jaida (Stephenson – bass) also has a certain soft spot for Shaggy but she doesn’t talk about it much.”

For the love of music

“What we love about making music is having free drinks with your favourite gal pals.”

Kicking goals

“2019 was so crazy for us but our biggest highlight so far would probably be doing the whole Falls Festival run over New Year’s. We used to dream of just attending Falls so being able to play every show was frickin amazing and so damn surreal.”

The year ahead

“We have a whole lot of sneaky stuff planned for 2020 but a lot of it is very secret at the moment, but we’re so keen to be starting the year off with another headline tour and a new single. This will be our second ever headline tour and we’re stoked to bring our besties Sputnik Sweetheart and Kitschen Boy with us around the country <3. Catch us all doing karaoke after every single show.”

When we chat in 12 months…

“We’d love to be able to sell out some more headline shows, play some more festivals and hopefully shimmy overseas sometime. We’re going to wait and see what 2020 throws at us but are sure it’ll be our fave year ever.”

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Essential Listening

Teen Jesus and the Jean Teasers – I Like That You Like That

“This is out on all of ya streaming platforms. It was the first single we released as a four-piece and it’s about bad bad people.”

Teen Jesus and the Jean Teasers - I Like That You Like That (Official Video)

Watch this video on YouTube

Teen Jesus and the Jean Teasers – See You In A Bit (I Still Care)

“This is the most recent single we’ve released. It’s a feisty bop and has its own run of shirts (available on our Bandcamp).”

See You In A Bit (I Still Care)

Watch this video on YouTube

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