Song of the Day: Dum Dum Girls - Lost Boys and Girls Club

Every Monday through Friday, we deliver a different song as part of our Song of the Day podcast subscription. This podcast features exclusive KEXP in-studio performances, unreleased songs, and recordings from independent artists that our DJs think you should hear. Today’s song, featured on the Midday Show with Cheryl Waters, is “Lost Boys and Girls Club” by Dum Dum Girls from their 2014 album, Too True, on Sub Pop.

Dum Dum Girls - Lost Boys and Girls Club (MP3)

Although her style is firmly rooted in classic pop and garage rock, Dum Dum Girls' Dee Dee Penny has revealed herself to be one of the more adaptive songwriters of the past few years, changing her aesthetic and atmosphere with every album only to produce consistently compelling results. Named in homage to The Vaselines' Dum Dum and Iggy Pop's "Dum Dum Boys", Dee Dee (a.k.a. Kristin Welchez) first released music under the Dum Dum Girls moniker in late 2008. I Will Be, the band's 2010 debut album, recalled lo-fi and garage pop hallmarks, but as the band progressed, Dum Dum Girls' music began to take on a more spacious, reverberating tone, enlisting The Raveonettes' Sune Rose Wagner and Richard Gottehrer to produce the increasingly shimmering He Gets Me High (2011), Only in Dreams (2011), and End of Daze (2012). The band's latest release, this year's Too True, continues that trend, incorporating a larger influence from 1980s alternative and shoegaze artists, resulting in an album that our own Gerrit Feenstra called "the most fully formed and resonant album offering of Dee Dee’s career". "Lost Boys and Girls Club" was the album's introductory single, and with its gorgeously shimmering melancholy, it could also very well serve as the album's mission statement. Moving at a languid pace, Dee Dee's unwavering voice sings a tale of masochistic loneliness, her protagonist prideful of her membership in the titular organization. Love, reciprocated or otherwise, has long been a theme Dee Dee has successfully mind, but on "Lost Boys and Girls Club" and Too True as a whole, she sounds more confident and in control than ever, painstakingly traversing the schism between romance and heartbreak with a effortless cool.

Dum Dum Girls will be back in Seattle next month when they play Neumos on April 5th and Live on KEXP that same day at 3PM. Get tickets and more info on that 21+ show here, keep up with the band on their website and Facebook, and watch the video for "Lost Boys and Girls Club" below.