The latest track from D.C.’s Teen Mortgage is a surreal travelogue through spacetime. The track’s central feature is a repeated drone note and fuzzy modal guitar scale, the latter of which is later echoed in a mesmerizing vocal line. While the infinite drone note begins to bind us in hypnotic stupor, the modal scale recurrently descends as though we’re instinctively marching down a mysterious ravine, but each time we reach the bottom, everything resets and repeats.
It’s a never-ending loop...until the chorus, which thrusts us into a heavier, sludgier psychedelic trance. The song draws the listener in with a facade of careless relaxation, but once under its spell, the mystic valley's pull subtly intensifies until we're utterly lost and dangerously trapped in the valley's dark depths, and in our own minds.
Strains of 90s hit “Pepper” and 60s psych classic “White Rabbit" are echoed in "Valley," but Teen Mortgage’s brand of psych sludge here is an encapsulated world of its own making. Listen through the track below and follow Teen Mortgage for more info on the band's newest album release, Smoked.
Teen Mortgage - Valley