Daisy the Great, the Brooklyn vocal duo comprising Kelley Dugan and Mina Walker who emerged from NYU with 2017’s “The Record Player Song” and its subsequent AJR remix, is, as expected, influenced by musical twosomes. But when the two members are really clicking, one and one make one, to borrow a lyric from The Who.
“I think one thing we strive to do is be a duo that is like as iconic as a single person, like the band is like its own person,” says Walker. “I really feel like if Kelley’s not there, it feels crazy. I think it feels like our voice together is the single voice, and I do think that came from a lot of our influences being one single, powerful person, and like us together is that one person.”
After the success of their first single (more than 270 million plays on TikTok), Daisy the Great released a pair of albums and several EPs, including last year’s “Spectacle: Daisy the Great vs. Tony Visconti,” with the septuagenarian producer known for his long-running collaboration with David Bowie. Next up is “The Rubber Teeth Talk,” their third full-length release, out June 27. There’s also a pre-release hometown show on May 7 at Night Club 101 in the East Village.
The two singles released from the album so far hint at the breadth of Daisy the Great: “Ballerina” recalls the ‘90s snark of Veruca Salt and Belly, while “Mary’s at the Carnival” is delicate and breezy.
Walker said the band intended on the new album to connect with their younger selves while not repeating themselves.
“This record felt like a time to embrace personality in a way that I don’t know that we didn’t do in the past,” Dugan said, “but I feel like we had a few more conversations about picking takes that preserved the personality in it and finding arrangements that felt like they let the imperfections shine, and the important thing is that it feels like it’s really human and personal and has a spirit of play that is able to be felt in the music.”
To help achieve that goal, Dugan and Walker worked with Catherine Marks, who has produced albums by Boygenius, Local Natives, Manchester Orchestra and other indie standouts. They were connected to Marks through Walker’s partner, who is a member of the band Lowertown, who has worked with the Australian producer and mixer.
Walker said she was impressed that the album Lowertown made with Marks was a big departure from their previous stuff “and I think also just listening specifically to records she’d worked on, none of them sounded like each other.”
While Dugan majored in acting at NYU, she was already establishing herself as a musician since her teenage years, performing in various venues in town and writing songs. Walker was less far into her musical career and was impressed when her best friend brought her to The Bitter End to see Dugan perform, as well as by her performances in class.
When they were assigned a sketch comedy project, they wrote a song together instead.
“We kind of immediately started harmonizing with each other kind of naturally,” Walker remembers. “I think we both grew up harmonizing with ourselves on GarageBand and stuff, and Kelley did like madrigals and arrangements. We made, like, a stupid song for class and that was the spark of it I guess.”
Wednesday’s show will give Daisy the Great an opportunity to play some songs from “The Rubber Teeth Talk” that fans haven’t heard yet, which Dugan enthuses about: “It feels really special to be able to play a song that people don’t know yet and have that space to show it. And it feels vulnerable, but in a really good way.”
The Manhattan show will be another in a long line of gigs in the city that brought them together – Dugan estimates Daisy the Great has played at Baby’s All Right alone 25 times.
“But my favorite show we’ve played is our Music Hall of Williamsburg show for our first album,” Walker says. “I hope to get or beat the energy of that show with the one that was not announced yet that we’ll do in New York for this album. The Music Hall show was the first time we headlined in New York. It was so cool to see a room that big singing back to you, the album and songs you put out like seven years ago, and I was just like, who are you? Like, where did you come from? And I was just like, I’m meeting our audience in New York and it’s so freaking cute.”
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