tenlung have never met a genre boundary they couldn’t make somebody else’s problem. On their debut album I Follow Birds, emo and pop-punk roots get tangled up with hyperpop, experimental indie and enough existential dread to make any genre label slightly useless.
Bigger, stronger and considerably louder than 2022’s demo tape, there is; no curse, I Follow Birds searches for identity through the fog of religious trauma, fear of hell and the lingering question of whether every bird overhead is a sign from God or just a normal bird. Join me as I dive into I Follow Birds track by track.
Fly
Before I Follow Birds can ask where the birds are taking us, “Fly” makes sure we can hear them. Actual birdsong sits alongside a softly picked guitar, peaceful enough that you could mistake it for some kind of sign, if that’s what you’re looking for. Then the voices creep in. They overlap, distort and grow increasingly difficult to make out as electronic sounds start eating away at all the quiet, turning something that’s initially comforting into something much harder to trust. At under a minute long, it’s barely a song, but that’s why it works so well: tenlung haven’t told us whether the birds are messengers from God, bad omens or just ordinary birds, yet we still follow them.
Chirp
Nothing ruins a perfectly good existential crisis like a bird that just won’t shut up. Flying past windshields, hanging around outside bedroom windows and generally turning up wherever tenlung are trying to have a perfectly good crisis. The guitars are just as fidgety as the birds, light on their feet one second before everything swells and gets a little too loud for the room. By the time “Could you stop chirping? I’m tryna lay here and worry” gives “Chirp” its more reasonable request, the bird has gone from potential divine messenger to neighborhood nuisance. Then comes “Is it a sign, do I just need some gas?” Spend long enough searching for God in everything, and even a gas light and something with wings can start looking like a message. No wonder “my head’s spinning” gets repeated until the song itself starts sounding a little dizzy.
Once the bird disappears, tenlung want it back. “I need that bird but where does it go” makes all the earlier complaining feel slightly premature, while the music starts giving the thought a little more room to breathe. That search drags them all the way back to being 6 years old, a bird landing on their shoulder with no one else around to confirm that it happened. “No one saw, was it real?” is exactly the sort of question I Follow Birds seems determined to make impossible to answer, so tenlung don’t. Instead, the song finds them back in their room with daylight coming through the window, only this time they actually get up, step outside and hold out an arm. Maybe a bird lands, maybe it doesn’t. For once, waiting to find out seems enough.
The Shed Song
2:30 is a terrible time to start wondering whether you actually want to be at the party. A couple of drinks, old school stories and somebody saying something sweet enough to earn a kiss on the cheek should all be fairly harmless, and for a minute the music seems willing to let them be. “Shed Song” leaves plenty of empty space around the vocals, with little hot flashes of guitar cutting in between lines like they’ve got something to add but don’t want to interrupt. “What do you like? What patterns do you find? Is it real? Or is it funny?” starts asking too many questions at once, those gaps getting smaller as the guitar pushes its way further into the conversation before dropping back around “Some days I really like it, some days I’d rather leave.” It’s not a huge shift, which is the point. The words are already making enough of a mess without the guitars needing to join in.
The chorus is where that mess keeps getting dragged back out for another look. “What do you like?” sounds simple enough the first time, but stick “Is it real? Or is it funny?” behind it and suddenly without even knowing what you enjoy requires a small investigation. By the final back-to-back choruses, tenlung aren’t getting any closer to finding an answer; they’re just worrying about the same questions until “All thoughts tangled into string” starts sounding less like a lyric and more like an admission of defeat. Even “Some days I really like it, some days I’d rather leave” refuses to pick a side. The song ends up doing exactly what the title promises, really liking it and still somehow finding a reason to stand halfway out of the door.
Don’t Know How To Exist
“Good morning, it’s the sunrise, oh another day to be alive!” arrives almost obnoxiously cheerful, with the guitars playing along with the joke for all of a few seconds before “(I realize)” pulls the floor out from underneath it. From there, “Don’t Know How To Exist” gets considerably less interested in pretending everything is fine. The vocals don’t stay clean, instead getting pushed through layers of distortion and effects that make certain words blur, crack and multiply around themselves, like one voice isn’t enough to contain everything that’s going on inside it. By the time “I don’t know how to exist in this world anymore” bounds into the chorus, the guitars have grown heavier and the vocals feel wider, more frantic along with them. Whatever was rattling around tenlung’s head has officially made it out of their mouth, just not in one straightforward way.
There’s no shortage of things making that difficult either. A feeling that has been hanging around “since turning 17,” grinding teeth, struggling to breathe, hearing people say your name and watching everybody else find their place in the world while you’re still “taking score.” Even the chorus can’t decide whether every day feels like starting over or like it’s “never over,” which is a particularly nasty little distinction when both sound exhausting. The vocal effects only make those repeated lines feel more crowded as the song goes on, until “Don’t know how to exist” sounds less like an admission and more like a thought bouncing around that they desperately want gone. Then, right as it should be finished, “1, 2, ready, go!” kicks everything into one final burst of noise, showing that the crisis isn’t quite over yet.
Anymore (Feat. Art Bobb)
Four years later, and apparently time has healed absolutely fuck all. Featuring Art Bobb, “Anymore” starts off relatively restrained, leaving plenty of room around “It feels like it might come close, ‘Til I find myself on the floor” before gradually letting the guitars take up more space. Then we get “The divine feeling of clipped wings,” because of course the birds were going to find their way back in eventually. Except clipped wings feel much bigger here than simply losing the ability to fly. They’re everything that taught you there were parts of yourself that needed cutting away before you could ever be considered good, divine or worthy in the first place. Put “Being who you are might fix me” directly after it and the contradiction gets far nastier; how are you supposed to figure out who you are when you’ve spent years being afraid of what you might find? “Will It? (It won’t)” answers that question almost immediately. It was nice while it lasted.
“It feels like I’m tearing apart, four long years and it still feels hard” lands less like some dramatic revelation and more like something that’s a little shameful to admit out loud, like four years should have been long enough for you to have fixed all of this and found yourself. By the time “Myself, my hope, I speak to you, will you let go?” comes around, the song has run low on places left to put that hope, with the music itself leaving enough space around the question to make it sting. I Follow Birds keeps looking for something that will finally make sense. “Anymore” is starting to suspect there might not be one.
Cold! Sad! Alone! (Feat. Madison Hailstorm)
tenlung barely sound like they’re in the same room as us at first. “I can’t sleep, I can’t breathe” comes through warped and lazy, the vocal effects stretching and smearing the words until they sound like one of the things “hovering in the corners” keeping them awake. It’s uncomfortable in exactly the right way, especially with no mattress, nobody lying next to them and apparently very little chance of getting any sleep tonight. As “Cold! Sad! Alone!” starts pulling the vocals out of that fog, everything gets a little harder to hide. “Cold, sad, are you feeling alone?” keeps poking at the obvious sore spot, while “I’m not that cold, I’m not that sad” tries its best to convince absolutely nobody. Throw a “shut the fuck up” on top, and the denial starts sounding more defensive than convincing. Except “I just don’t know the key to being someone” answers a much bigger question, slipping out between all that denial before tenlung have a chance to hide it.
The whole album starts leaking into the room. “Don’t chirp at me, they might hear it” brings the birds back, except the thing tenlung were holding an arm out for earlier is suddenly something that might give them away. Somehow, all this shame and existential dread also produces the closest I Follow Birds gets to a proper dance-along. The song locks into a ridiculously infectious momentum underneath the repeated “I’m not that cold, I’m not that sad,” making it almost impossible not to move along while tenlung are busy trying to convince themselves they’re fine. “Nice show, nice save, nice God, I pray” keeps God firmly tangled up in this mess, before “at least outside it’s okay to be alone” finally opens up enough for the loneliness to feel almost peaceful when nobody gets to decide it for you. “Can someone please show some weakness or could you just shut the fuck up?” gets the last word, because tenlung don’t actually seem to need someone to tell them everything will be okay. They just need literally one other person to stop pretending that it is.
Deadline
It may have taken seven songs, but finally someone has suggested slowing down. “Deadline” actually gives it a go, stripping everything back while “Slow down the track” comes through warped and distant, the vocal effects stretching the words until they feel like they’re being heard from the other side of tenlung’s head. It gives the opening this strange, disconnected feeling, especially when “it’s safe to say I’ve lost it” arrives sounding too calm about the whole thing. The guitar and drums keep their distance too, slipping into the empty spaces without disturbing them much. But then every feeling becomes “a sacred sign,” making every little thing start to look suspiciously important, the quiet getting harder to hold onto. By the time tenlung are lying awake “connecting every dot,” the song hasn’t sped up yet, but their head has.
“Deadline” properly loses it. The vocals start spilling forward as one thought elbows the next out of the way: asking for help way too late, having “every talent” and finding them all “fucking useless,” heaven, wasted potential and lying awake dreaming of dying in shame. The guitars grow heavier underneath it all, making the second half feel cramped compared to all the space left open in the beginning. “Brand new world filled with your potential” should feel encouraging, except next to “I’ve got every talent but it’s fucking useless,” it sounds more like a threat. By “No more time, lost my mind, again, why?” sentences are growing shorter, thoughts are snapping apart and tenlung can barely keep hold of one before the next arrives. “Wrote you down to keep around, but I can’t pay attention” is where we’re left as the track plays out to distorted guitars.
Cage
If you can’t escape the cage, you might as well try and seek comfort in being confined. “Cage” settles into a repeating guitar figure and barely moves from it, letting “I don’t think it ever really shakes” go around and around until the song starts doing the same “back and forth” as the person stuck inside. Then comes “My God could never melt away the sway, maybe I can find comfort in my cage,” which is a pretty miserable way to make peace with yourself. After spending so much of I Follow Birds asking God, birds and basically anything willing to listen for some kind of answer, tenlung are starting to consider whether the thing trapping them might also be the thing keeping them safe. The vocals stay exposed, the guitars slowly grow around them and those four lines come back again. Nothing changes. Maybe that’s the problem.
And suddenly someone remembers the cage has a door. The guitars start bursting out of all that restraint, getting bigger, dirtier and increasingly difficult to contain while the lyrics panic about what’s being suggested. “Fly away, just stay” is freedom and fear having an argument in six words, because getting out is only half the problem. “Fly away, no place, okay” isn’t much more reassuring; you can open that cage, but it won’t magically give you somewhere to go. By the end of the song, the guitars are practically swallowing the words they spent most of the song dancing around. tenlung might have finally found their wings again, but an open cage still requires them to decide whether they’re ready to leave it.
I Follow Birds (Feat. Deanna Gowland, Art Bobb)
Featuring Deanna Gowland and Art Bobb, “I Follow Birds” might just be the most laid-back track on the album, which naturally means it ends up carrying some of its biggest feelings. The guitars wander rather than fight for space, leaving everything unusually open after an album full of thoughts tripping over each other. “It’s a new destination, in my migration” finally gives those birds, cages and clipped wings somewhere to go, even if nobody has bothered supplying a clear route. Deanna’s vocals make that shift feel even bigger, gently appearing alongside “I saw something in your eyes” and “telling me to fly” like another bird has quietly joined the flock. tenlung have spent most of I Follow Birds staring at the sky, wondering what the hell they’re supposed to be seeing. For once, following seems more important than figuring it out, at least for now.
“I don’t think I’ll know, but I know I can’t go home” would have been enough to cause an existential crisis about five songs ago, but tenlung just let it sit. “I think I can change, I think it’s okay, to take my time with it” isn’t some massive revelation, but after the previous songs on this album, it feels like a huge breakthrough. The vocals cut off with “I can now say I follow-” and the music takes it from there. A dancier melody starts, picking up momentum until this supposedly laid-back track suddenly has somewhere to be. That little rush doesn’t last forever. Eventually, all that movement dies down, leaving behind an acoustic guitar and not much else. tenlung still haven’t found out exactly where the birds are taking them, but knowing when to follow is enough for now.
Tell The World/Okay
Any peace that the title track found lasted approximately one song. “Tell The World/Okay” opens small and uneasy, with guitar picking underneath vocals that already sound exhausted by the weight of “I’m carrying something, that’s pretty bad.” God is immediately back hovering overhead too, because apparently we weren’t getting rid of him that easily. “If you’re there God, I hope you’re not. Could you stop hovering my head?” turns prayer into something closer to paranoia; tenlung want an answer, just preferably without God actually being the one to give it. The music slowly swells around that confession, and tenlung keep finding worse things to admit to: shaking phone calls, medication, shame, “What the fuck is wrong with me?” and then the ever so helpful “You’re a terrible person, yeah I know.” After spending an album trying to work out who you are, there’s something much scarier about figuring out whether you like the person you’ve uncovered.
“If only I had birds’ wings, to fly away and just be free” should feel hopeful by now, but it doesn’t. The song grows heavier around that wish before falling into four repeated “Okay”s, each one sounding a little stranger than the last. Okay as acceptance? Okay as giving up? Okay because they’ve run out of other words to say?
“Do two birds betray? Does one fly away?” manages to make leaving complicated all over again, while “So still I’ll sing, but what’s the melody?” is about as close as I Follow Birds was ever going to get to admitting it still has no clue. One final “Okay” and that’s the answer, sort of.
Spending a whole album trying to untangle years of God, guilt and figuring out who the fuck you are may be slightly ambitious of tenlung, but I Follow Birds gives it one hell of a good go. They’ve spent the album looking for signs in everything, running from some of them, desperately trying to chase others and occasionally telling them to shut the fuck up. By the end, there’s no big answer waiting. What there is, though, is movement. “I don’t know how to exist” eventually makes room for “I think it’s okay, to take my time with it,” and that tiny difference feels bigger than any miraculous revelation could. Nobody ever said getting better had to sound convincing.
Check out Berry from tenlung on the Rock For Initiative podcast!