Tchotchke’s “Poor Girl” Video is a Vintage, Glamorous Fever Dream

 

I remember the creepy dolls that are pervasive in this new video by Tchotchke.  The dolls torment me to this day. 

 

NYC’s Tchotchke is “your new favorite band” (Paste). Today, they announce Playin’ Dumb, their new album produced by The Lemon Twigs out September 5th, and share a delightfully off kilter new single/video, “Poor Girl.” Playin’ Dumb’s 11 tracks are sophisticated and sonically complex, leaning heavily into the band’s love of 60’s rock and outsider popsters like Harry Nilsson, Dolly Mixture, and Sparks. Channeling a Shangri-Las style of conversational vocals, the cast of characters that Tchotchke personifies in Playin’ Dumb embody classic girl group traits of lovelorn winners and losers. The band thinks of these narrators as hyper-feminine caricatures of themselves, with aspects of their personalities amplified to the point of high drama.

 

Anastasia Sanchez (vocals, drums) and Eva Chambers (bass, keys, vocals) met in the mirror of an L.A. high school locker room in 2014—they were both fixing their bangs. A deep musical friendship was quickly formed, forged on a shared love of everything from vintage dolls to the Beach Boys, and resulting in a handful of bands together. Several years passed before fellow L.A. musician Emily Tooraen (guitar, vocals) entered Anastasia and Eva’s orbit and everything finally clicked. A move to the East Coast followed, and the band released Tchotchke (2022), a full-tilt rock’n’roll gem of catchy guitar riffs, powerpop piano lines and hook-heavy vocals. Tours with King Tuff, Broncho, The Gossip and The Makeup followed, and the band found themselves crossing the U.S. and Europe throughout 2023 and 2024.

 

To write Playin’ Dumb, the band came to the studio with songs fully arranged and demoed. They again enlisted the Lemon Twigs to produce, this time in a Brooklyn studio aptly dubbed “The Vegetable Attic” (due to the produce warehouse located downstairs). Playin’ Dumb was recorded over the course of four seasons. Contending with the Lemon Twigs’ touring schedule, Tchotchke would jump back into the studio whenever there was a chance; from sweating it out above the wilting vegetables to walking on ice with guitars and enduring days without the heat on in order to get the perfect studio sound.

 

Today’s bluesy, mid-tempo “Poor Girl” is an antonymously-named track about spoiled brats that shows off the band’s penchant for lyrics with tongue planted firmly in cheek. On the Joey Ramone-esque title track, a narrator laments behind a wall-of-sound arrangement that she keeps playing the “dim dum-dum” so that her boyfriend feels smart—even though she hates it. The video, directed by Kaila Chambers and Hilla Eden, features the band, and peers into the wonderful world of Tchotchke. It visualizes their “surreal, primary-coloured vintage alternate universe” (Guitar).

Emily elaborates: “We confined ourselves to creating the personas of three ungrateful and out-of-touch girls with complete stories in the span of four lines each. The challenge was emphasizing the fact that these girls were not ‘poor’ in the slightest but, in fact, very privileged to have the self-imposed problems they’re so tortured over. The song embraces the girls’ short sob stories while also capturing a sunshiney, Beach Boys quality. It wasn’t until after the completion of the song, to our collective shock, that we realized our counterparts had effortlessly cast themselves. All along, we were creating the villain versions of each other.”