Indie-Garage-Rock Is So Back: Deep Sea Peach Tree at NYC’s Mercury Lounge

Photo by Emma Wilde

The Lower East Side’s indie music scene is still up and running, thank you for asking. Nestled in one of New York City’s infamous small gig venues known for setting the stage for acts like Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Interpol, and The Strokes (among so many others), Mercury Lounge prevails today as one of my favorite spaces to “you know, go see a show.” It’s one of the institution-type small ballrooms, and it is by all means a New York establishment forever synonymous with the current indie music scene. 

The scenes which do in fact hop and skip around Canal St., Ludlow., and other likes of East Village and LES seem to gravitate to an element of Mercury Lounge, especially when NY native Kristof Denis kicks off his Deep Sea Peach Tree tour that night. 

Walking into Mercury Lounge on that cold Wednesday, it was not surprising to have it be rather quiet, for it was small and still warm with familiar people familiarizing other semi-familiar people. The bill was short, the show on the early side, and everyone all stood in guarded groups of two or three. 

New York born psychedelic-indie band Self-Help was first, shredding their rockabilly with a tinge of midwest emo, a band that I had placed on one of my rolling playlists around the malevolent age of eighteen. They produced a sound worthy of inter-group free dancing, if not light moshing, and, at the very least, if not a conducive full-body rocking. Their single “Sick on a Saturday'' off their album Adult Cartoons (2018) was melodic and harmless, jammy and subdued, and I was in a light trance from all the silky riffs. 

Following Self-Help was another New York born, this time girl-fronted, band Maya Lucia, who god bless them, broke that awkward gap between stage and crowd which always occurs for the openers. 

Maya Lucia was the type of bedroom indie-pop that you scream to when you need to tell that boy who’s been manipulating you for weeks to finally end things, and yet you still end up crying for weeks after the loss. My former angsty teenage girl was depressed and angry when Maya sang lyrics like “Teenage Pain/ Never goes away” from the single “Preteen” off the 2019 EP lashing out, thick in that syrupy smell of Victoria’s Secret fragrance fresh from gym class. The band brought the crowd to a jumpy-ish prance, and I saw many heads jamming out. 

By the time Deep Sea Peach Tree was about to go on, the semi-circle of hell between stage and crowd had shortened and I was in the third row, watching the quartet fiddle away at their intricately laid pedal boards.

I left in the interim to get my favorite show drink (a tonic water). Leaning over the bar to see what mixer options they had to choose from, I heard the familiar ring of caramel guitar reverb and the soft humming of dreamy vocals. Deep Sea Peach Tree had begun with no introduction. 

I suppose it was not necessary to claim who they were, or where they were from at the beginning, for it seemed as though everyone in the crowd already knew. That was the scene of Mercury Lounge: you go when you want to see the headliner, and you end up dealing with the openers. Not uncommon of these local shows, but that’s how the early stuff works. 

When I entered back through the doors, reclaiming my spot, there were three girls I could see who began their orderly swaying in unison, and the man toward the back of the room stood in classic guy-at-an-indie-show-who-may-be-too-old-to-be-there stance: gripping some low quality canned beer in the left hand while the right hand sticks itself just barely into the right pocket of skinny-enough black, gray, or blue jeans. He nodded his head in approval, lifting and dropping his chin with each metered stab and perfected high-hat hit. 

Everyone in that crowd had the air of knowing someone on stage––there was comfort in the collective. I suppose it must stem from that very egoismsm which began playing without the need to introduce the title of who it was that was performing. They were easily distinguished as who they were, and that was that; there was no need for redundant words. 

Their silence seemed to suggest a type of informality which made standing and watching so normal, like a friend showing you their new demo in their new apartment and you don’t know what else to say other than “this is so good, dude.” 

I didn’t know much of the project at that point, having only heard their debut album Vaguely Navy (2017) when I was eighteen or so. The album arrived to me at a mischievous and apathetic age, when I was drenched in Surf Curse’s Buds (2013), Beach Fossils’ Somersault (2017) and Vundabar’s Gawk (2015), high-strung on cutting my blonde hair shorter and shorter. 

Vaguely Navy itself is mischievous and apathetic, labored with melancholy and uncertain feelings brought to life in its dreamy reverb guitar landscape rich in soft structured drumming. It tapers the edges of traditional narratives sung and performed by singer-songwriters, using simple lyrics to convey the whole “I’m lost and alone (without you)” feeling without the persistent over-producing and over-zealous loops and bridges. 

There is a certain I-Made-This-In-My-Room lo-fi element to it, but the band really uses this to their advantage, tapping into an indie-garage sound which has become so popular since the 2010s following the 90s and early zeroes garage-rock revival, forefronted by bands like Sonic Youth, Ariel Pink, and Pixies. 

This eruption of indie garage rock has taken over the tumblr-born angsty gen Z in its attempt to acclimate into a world that is completely new to them with the knowledge that is completely new to everyone else, tasked with the overbearing weight of the question: What happens when the first generation who grows up with smartphones, social media, and a general sense of being “tapped in” to everything all the time tries to become romantic individualists? 

Kristof seems to try to tackle this questions throughout Deep Sea Peach Tree’s discography, answering with the dullness of grown-out relationships, fighting frightful intrusive thoughts: “I’m tired/ Tired of only wanting what’s new/ I’m tired” from “Temper Tantrums” off Vaguely Navy speaking well to the matter.   

This type of call-and-response loneliness that Deep Sea’s lyrics depict is not uncommon lofi indie garage music’s revival, and can be seen as a large portion of what the music most popular indie rock artists of our current generation are all about: acts like Mac Demarco, Beach House, and Tame Impala often ensuing the audience in a melodic cascade of universal heartbreak stuck in some early stage of grief. 

Deep Sea Peach Tree fits the category perfectly, using heavy reverberations and jumpy melodies to pick up the energy amongst the brain fog. It surprises you when the tempo quickly drops, and then builds, and then jumps out into a quickly picked, highly fretted guitar-fronted sound, one that is as wet as rain in the summer and carefully carved as marbled statues in a shiny and untouched museum.

Hits from their debut album Vaguely Navy, the album which had initially walked onto my Spotify rotation in 2019 and influenced my walking into Mercury Lounge that night, included “Strawberry Milk,” “Village Market,” and title track “Vaguely Navy.” The name of the album seems wholly indicative of the band’s sound: that reverberating vague melancholia in its low intensity melodic sound still glittering in psychedelic-indie, surf rock riffs; the one that sounds so sweet but feels so painful. 

Dug beneath approachable, if not generic, lyrics, is a type of uncertain fuzz deriving from the creative direction of frontman Kristof, one which seems to have gathered in the brain building over time a deeply blue, deeply felt, unresolved grief. The album is nonetheless a hard-hitting, soft-landing debut powered by the hypnotic grounding of dreamy drum fills, the ethereal picking of downtempo jangly guitar melodies, clashing with the jumpy enthusiasm of contrasting bass lines and sordid lyrics. There in their most popular song “Strawberry Milk” is the somber guitar pop that makes laying in bed staring at the ceiling so enjoyable.

Entranced and safe in my room is how I felt listening to the well-curated, tightly-performed and easily swayable tracks as Deep Sea stiffly bounced on the stage in front of me. I was partial to songs like “Same Bathtub” off Vaguely Navy (2019), “You and McGregor” off their most recent album release Certain Thoughts (2022), and their 2019 single“Xanzibar.” The latter of which offered a nice change of pace from the original sounds, with textured and groovy bass lines, pouring a softer, slower, more lo-fi sonic feeling. 

Deep Sea Peach Tree's performance was receptive in a comforting sense of togetherness and shared sadness. The melancholy radiated, creating some barriers of vulnerability, but still everyone adapted to the shifting tempos. The pangs of drum fills acted as the pulse for the evening, overtaking that of all of our fractured hearts and listless minds. We all listened and applauded in gratitude for Deep Sea Peach Trees' perfected performance.

As the band goes on tour across America, ending in today's cult indie favorite Los Angeles venue “El Cid,” I have to forfeit any doubt that their unique wet sound and no frills attitude on stage will gather the hearts of many garage/lofi indie/pop rock/slacker rock/jangle pop lovers who need one more band to add to their incredibly curated spotify wrapped. If no one else, I suppose I will heed the way. Hear more of Deep Sea Peach Tree on Spotify, Apple Music, Bandcamp, and more.