Rock n Roll Saviors: The Orwells
The Orwells from suburban Chicago, Illinois are bringing teenage rock n roll exuberance back to a country — and a generation — that sorely needs it.
By Katie Ingegneri
Photography by Daniel Topete
Part 1 of 2
(Part 2: A Conversation with Mario Cuomo)
All of us who’ve become artists, musicians, poets, dancers, film directors — God knows what — we were all once children who loved to delve into our other ego, where anarchy and limitlessness reigns.
Mamma Andersson
Rock n roll has been the refuge of the American teenager since Chuck Berry and Elvis. The outlet for all the feelings you weren’t allowed to have at school and in church, the horniness and boredom and angst of being a teenager in suburban America. It’s the time in your life when you’re the most uncynically alive, while the system tries its hardest to tame you. When there’s no escape, the only answer is to blast your favorite song and disappear into it. Or to pick up a guitar or a microphone or a notebook and create your way to your own world.
For those of us who came of age in the first decade of the new American century, it’s been nothing but doomsday fears and distant wars and our country falling apart under the pretenses of “freedom.” We were born in the 1980s and 90s. We grew up going to the same stores in the same malls. We had an MTV that didn’t show music videos anymore, a recession that revealed the meaninglessness of going into massive debt for a degree that couldn’t get you a job, legions of doctors willing to prescribe antidepressants and amphetamines for our teenage feelings, DARE programs in public school selling us the propaganda of the failed War on Drugs (and don’t forget about abstinence-only education!), with broken nuclear family units at home.
They told us rock n roll was dead. They told us punk was dead. Corporations took over your local radio station and your local concert hall. Kurt Cobain was dead, and with him the last of our counterculture dreams — even if we were mostly too young to remember his death at the time.
Enter: The Orwells, from Elmhurst, Illinois. Chicago suburbs, the heart of America. Rock n roll saviors for our not-yet-completely-lost generation.
Fronted by 21-year-old Mario Cuomo, a rock idol for a new generation, powered by guitarists Matt O’Keefe and Dominic Corso, and backbone provided by fraternal twins Grant Brinner on bass and Henry Brinner on drums, the Orwells are the rock n roll band we’ve been waiting for.
Who knew you could still fall in love like your first time with rock n roll in 2014? (And now 2015, into a brighter future…at least for music.)
At their live shows, the Orwells make girls scream and audiences tear down the stage, thriving in the barely controlled chaos of a Dionysian rock orgy. Lyrics evoke a raucous house party, with alcohol, sex, and violence: the American Holy Trinity. Mario writhes and screams, stage diving into the crowd and kissing fans (female and male) while the rest of the band keeps it tight and together. While they may echo their various vintage and contemporary influences, there’s no one out there like them today.
In the past 2 years, The Orwells have played on “Late Night with David Letterman” twice (including their notorious first performance), had their music featured in an Apple iPad commercial and a major motion picture (“If I Stay”), their album mentioned by Rainn Wilson in a Tweet, taken Instagram pictures with Kelly Osbourne, Breaking Bad’s Aaron Paul, Dave Chappelle, and similar-in-age pop sensation Charli XCX, almost started riots at Bonnaroo Music Festival and anywhere else they play. It still seems pretty surreal for kids who only graduated (or in Mario’s case, dropped out of) high school in those past two years.
On New Year’s Eve 2013, the Orwells were playing live at Strat’s Diner in suburban Villa Park, Illinois. On New Year’s Eve 2014, six months after the major release of their second album, Disgraceland, they played the second of two nights of sold-out shows at the intimate and high-profile Lincoln Hall in Chicago. They’ve moved beyond suburban garages and basements to driving audiences wild in London, Tokyo, Barcelona, Dublin — wherever people are looking to dance and sweat and have a good time.
The first Letterman performance, in which Mario gyrated on the ground, didn’t sing half of the lyrics to their hit “Who Needs You” and sat in the guest chair, had people wondering what this kid was on. Mario’s on-stage antics, magnetic presence and wild long blonde hair have helped people take notice of this otherwise pretty regular-looking group of white suburban kids. It’s hard not to notice a tall blonde guy wearing a leopard-print tank top, writhing around on the floor and climbing the amplifiers, with a commanding voice that echoes some of rock and punk’s greatest performers from Jim Morrison to Karen O.
Mario found his “guitarist with mystique” (to quote Almost Famous) and requisite dark-haired counterpart in Matt O’Keefe, a kid so jailbaitingly handsome he should be starring in a Disney channel show or a 1980s John Hughes movie (set in Illinois, of course). At just 20 years old, he’s the Jimmy Page to Mario’s Robert Plant, or maybe more appropriately, the Joan Jett to Mario’s Cherie Currie—the Runaways being the original jailbait rock band. Matt is an intensely charismatic presence on- and off-stage, in his denim and Converse, leading many of the band’s interviews and manning their Twitter account with a mix of young wisdom, sentimentality, drunkenness and a shining true love of rock n roll. It’s hard to look away.
With insanely wholesome, all-American fraternal twins Grant and Henry Brinner, who also seem like they should have had their own TV show about the adventures of twins who cause trouble in the suburbs and start a band, and Dominic Corso, Mario’s energetic, vintage-Strokes-channeling cousin rounding out the group, the Orwells are distinctively, unapologetically kids — kids you went to high school with, who you cheered for at Battle of the Bands and drank someone’s parents’ liquor with at house parties. Kids from the heart of America, like in every town and every suburb, and even on every farm and in the city.
That’s part of their appeal — they’re like your charismatic, fun, weird musician friends, not distant and untouchable stars up on a pedestal. And their rock n roll is the kind of music I could see a younger me listening to while driving my parents’ car, bombing around the suburbs, going to the mall cause it’s the only thing to do when the city’s too far away, and you’re too young to go to a bar anyway.
Roughly the same age as One Direction, and America’s latest rock n roll answer to the eternal popularity of “boy bands,” the Orwells are a kind of Strokes for the next generation — the first (non-vintage) band I grew up obsessing over in the early 2000s, and the band the Orwells credit with inspiring them to pick up their own guitars and get going the same way. Julian Casablancas is the spiritual father of this rock n roll generation.
The Strokes were about the Orwells’ age when Is This It came out, but even looking back on it now, they never really seemed like kids, with their well-styled prep school grunge outfits, tousled hair and faces that were the products of famous fathers and supermodel mothers. The Strokes always seemed a little untouchable, a little too perfect—which is part of why we idolized them, but there’s something very compelling now about the Orwells’ boy-next-door relatability.
The Orwells might be a little young to remember (unless they were rocking out to the latest indie music as elementary schoolers, which wouldn’t surprise me), but Is This It came out within a few months of 9/11. Track 9, the great “New York City Cops,” was removed from the release (with the singsong-y lyrics “New York City cops, they ain’t too smart”) and replaced with the upbeat but hollow “When It Started.” I was in 8th grade at the time. After 9/11, my school rerouted the Washington DC trip we were supposed to go on in the spring to historic Philadelphia, which was torture for a bunch of 13-year-olds who grew up in a historic Massachusetts suburb. The only good part of the trip was when we got to go to a mall on the way home and I bought the “Hard to Explain”/“New York City Cops” single with the glass chair on the front at one of the music stores (still 5 years away from going out of business). I blasted it in my headphones via my shiny blue Discman on the bus ride home and loved it, its energy and defiance and how it seemed forbidden. The true essence of rock n roll. Like when my mother was growing up, going to Catholic school in Boston, and the nuns told them to turn off the TV if Elvis came on.
I hadn’t felt the way I did about the Strokes for another new band until the Orwells this year. There are a whole lot of great bands out there these days, but no one’s caught my eye like these kids from right outside my adopted city.
This is not a story of kids who saw success happen overnight, who just stumbled into their sound. Disgraceland, the album that got them noticed in 2014, is not even their debut album. It’s actually their second release after 2012's Remember When — and this after 2 albums they produced in high school, as Mario told me. Their years of playing together pay off in the kind of group chemistry that allows them to have a tight sound while easily descending into controlled punk chaos, and coming back up again — something that really works for them in both their songwriting and wild live shows.
They’ve been hustling hard since they were young teenagers, and family support seems to have played, and no doubt continues to play, a huge role in their success. Their parents, seeing the talent and determination in their teenagers, allowed them to pursue their rock dreams instead of pushing them towards more conventional routes. With brothers and cousins making up 80% of the band, it’s a hometown family affair that may help them avoid the egotistical splintering that can come with success.
Beyond the band, Matt’s older brother Eddie directs many of the Orwells’ music videos and shot the photographs for Disgraceland, and his New Americana style is the perfect branding for this band. And Eddie’s girlfriend is Greta Morgan, a singer-songwriter and bandleader who helped give the Orwells early breaks performing in Chicago, and who performed alongside them with her excellent “technicolor daydream pop” band Springtime Carnivore at the New Year’s Eve show at Lincoln Hall. By starting out early, they’re coming into the kind of sound and artistic connections that can take older bands years to attain.
The Orwells are still so young, that, to reference Almost Famous again, I wonder if any of them were deflowered by gangs of groupies — having started to tour seriously and incite mania around their collective 18th birthday. Ever-so-slightly older Mario plays the role of rock god well, and with lyrics like “life is better with a handful of ass/badass shades and a bag full of grass,” the energy the Orwells exude becomes more than the sum of their collective parts as girls try to make out with Mario while boys eagerly climb up to stage dive and sing along. The Orwells seem to be living every kid’s dream — playing great music and partying every night, traveling the country and being surrounded by adoring ladies.
But as many rock star dreams as they may conjure, they’re really just a group of humble, hard-working, musically literate kids. And they excel at retaining a family-friendly vibe during interviews that demand lewd Led Zeppelin-esque tales of the road. They know their proud parents are going to be watching every piece of media and they want to be respectful. (Most of them also still live at home when they’re not touring.) The Orwells are still just wholesome Midwestern kids, even if they are the Orwells.
They strike the perfect balance between utter chaos and control, the ideal for any rock n roll band. This was revealed in spades on their excellent high school debut Remember When on Autumn Tone Records, with standouts including the scuzzy, snotty-punk, extremely catchy “Mallrats (La La La),” distinctly Weezer-channeling “Halloween All Year,” horny teenage angst of “In My Bed,” and postmodern shrieking blues of “Under The Flowers.” They evoke retro rock n roll, garage rock, punk, post-punk, grunge, New Wave, and everything in between.
Some of my other favorite Orwells songs include their “rip-offs” on the Who Needs You EP, tributes to the Misfits and Black Lips. It’s always great when artists — musicians, writers, whatever — pay direct tribute to the people who inspired them. And they’re two fucking great songs, throbbing, high-energy garage rock that I actually really wish had been included on Disgraceland.
Their direct covers, like Iggy & the Stooges’ “I Wanna Be Your Dog,” fantastically demonstrate the raucous punk energy that they channel directly from their idols. The short video of that performance is probably them in a nutshell: Mario channeling 70s punk in leopard skin and leather while the band are all in their suburban t-shirts and button-downs, playing wildly until the stage is overtaken by drunkenly enthusiastic dudes in London —one of the birthplaces and continual appreciators of good rock n roll.
You can find evidence of their years of hard work in fragments across the Internet: what it means to be a band growing up in the social media era. Baby Orwells excel in an extremely early cover of Girls’ “Lust For Life,” in which they are so young and adorable I can’t even stand it. You can even find tracks from their high school albums, like “Psychopath,” amazing early representations of the energy and talent as performers and songwriters. While the recording quality is a little rough (I think they recorded most of their songs in Matt’s basement) it does fit really well with the songs and shows their early grasp on the DNA of rock and punk songwriting.
The vast interwebs also reveal other projects informing their style, such as Dominic’s sweetly haunting “Blue Moon” cover, an excellent “rap” song “Blunts” posted on YouTube by “MC-MC” Mario (clearly backed by the Orwells) and Matt’s “Baby Chuck” vintage rock n roll persona (exemplified by “Teenage Libido”). All of their songs are dripping with attitude but also a sweet youthful sincerity. I can only hope they continue to channel it into their subsequent albums.
It’s easy to be a fan, or a fangirl as I call myself, in the social media era, when you can follow the kids and the band on Instagram and Twitter and Facebook. I would have killed to have had this kind of fragmentary, intensely personal access to the likes of Nick Valensi and Julian Casablancas back in 2002. Tiny snapshots into their immediate worlds. The Orwells fandom is an exuberant place of hormones and enthusiasm, even creating its own memes like the Twitter account “Grant’s Jackets,” a very affectionate, picture-heavy commentary on the simple fact Grant Brinner is always wearing different jackets. It’s a fun fan group to be a part of, the likes of which I don’t see replicated many places (at least with the kind of bands I’m interested in these days).
I feel so much older than the Orwells kids — something that was intensely highlighted at the Lincoln Hall shows, where the median age was probably 20 — but as a late-1980s baby I’m really not that much older, I just have had more time to absorb the fuckery our generation has been enduring. Which is maybe why I appreciate the Orwells so much at this point in time.
Fangirling aside, The Orwells are not yet the most stylistically sophisticated rock n roll band out there (that would currently be Deerhunter and Parquet Courts, in my opinion), but their songs are strong, they’re young, talented, and energetic, they have great chemistry, and they have one hell of a frontman in Mario. They have plenty of time to take their momentum and achieve greater and greater things. Their future looks pretty dazzlingly bright…as long as they don’t fall prey to any old rock n roll cliches. (Just — avoid heroin.)
Discovering The Orwells
I first came across The Orwells when I was clicking through the Pitchfork app in Spotify in early June 2014, checking out the new album releases. The name of the band caught my eye immediately, as did the title, Disgraceland — both emblazoned in big letters on a blue sky over a nondescript suburban house. George Orwell, Big Brother, Elvis, the suburbs, America after Bush. Being a product of the Boston suburbs myself, and a recent Chicago transplant, I was immediately intrigued.
Actually, that was not the first time I had heard of them. The very first time was when I stumbled across some news story playing up a beef between them and Arctic Monkeys, whom they had just gone on tour with. I didn’t know who the Orwells were and didn’t pay it much mind, but I thought it was funny that a big band was getting called out for being synchronized and repetitive by their relatively unknown opening act — a first indication of the breath of fresh air the Orwells bring to the bloated, mainstream business of rock n roll.
So, back to Disgraceland. I loved it, and immediately bought the vinyl at Reckless Records despite not even owning a record player (shoutout to the accompanying digital download and now, at the time of this writing, having a record player.) Something about them was turning me into a impulsive rock fan again, and I liked it. Disgraceland was like the hyper little brother to the Arcade Fire’s The Suburbs. If The Suburbs was the melancholy older sibling who left for the big city, reeling from the adolescent alienation of growing up in a house that looks just like everyone else’s house, Disgraceland was actually “still screaming” (as Win Butler might say) to get out, playing punk rock in the basement and drinking underage.
My favorite song off the bat was “Who Needs You,” the now-famous tune that’s in all the ads and movies. It reminded me of the first time I heard “Last Nite,” an electric rush of guitars and pounding drums. But while Julian Casablancas sang of how “no one ain’t ever gonna understand,” here this Orwells kid was shouting his defiance at the stifling fear of growing up in America in the Foul Years of Our Lord (to borrow from Dr. H.S. Thompson) after 9/11. To me, lines like “You better burn that flag/cause it ain’t against the law” are a nod to both the encroaching Orwellian Big Brother surveillance state and an embrace of the freedoms like speech and protest that once made America great, freedoms that we still enjoy — at least for now. And the line “You better join the army/I said ‘no thank you, dear old Uncle Sam’” is a rejection of the knee-jerk militarism of the post-9/11 age and of a culture that pressures young people to join up with America’s empire machine instead of pursuing education or the arts.
I love “Who Needs You” because it’s the perfect fuck you to all that, the fuck you that I and doubtless millions of others of my generation have been waiting for our whole lives without knowing it. We might be under permanent surveillance, facing increasing violence on the part of the American state to its citizens and people abroad, and the violence of citizen against citizen, but we’re still young, we’re still alive, and we can still have fun. It was definitely my favorite song of 2014, and one of those rare songs that I can listen to a million times and more, at top volume, without getting tired of it. Of course, like any good piece of genuine “youth culture,” it was quickly picked up and sold in an iPad ad and a Hollywood teen movie. That’s okay, though — that’s usually how it goes.
In the “Who Needs You” music video, the band plays in front of a huge screen of iconic American imagery and an electric American flag. I love how it alternates between the band in light and in complete shadow in front of the flag — a transcendence of individuals, the undying lineage of American rock n roll bands.
The other major standout on Disgraceland is “Blood Bubbles,” a haunting post-punk doo-wop song that’s like making out with your boyfriend or girlfriend during a horror movie at the drive-in. It was amazing during both nights of the Lincoln Hall performances, and is one of the best songs they’ve written so far. The video features a black 60s-style girl group lip-synching the Other Voices EP version of the song, a slower, Ronettes-meets-Ramones death groove. It’s really hard to pick a favorite version.
Their other notable videos include a very sexy girl-next-door burlesque striptease for Disgraceland’s raunchy, Doors-esque “Dirty Sheets,” and the band dressing up as eyeliner-wearing skater punks hanging out at the local mall in Remember When’s “Mallrats (La La La).” I also really like the “Other Voices” video that features photos and footage of the Orwells’ early years playing as a band in their hometown. Rock n roll is nothing if not incredibly sentimental just below the surface.
Lineage, the Chicago Renaissance, and the Future
One of the better aspects to growing up a “Millennial” is the amount of cultural history and technology we have access to, access we take for granted. For me, the Orwells kids, and the rest of our generation, we have access to more music than previous generations could even dream of. We’ve been witness to technology evolving from tapes to CDs to MP3s, the death of CD stores and the resurgence of vinyl, and now royalty-eating but incredible exposure platforms like Spotify. The Internet may enable piracy and free sharing, but at the same time, it’s easier than ever for people all over the globe to listen to a band’s music.
Aided by this brave new world of technology-enabled access to music, the Orwells seem to have a firm and expansive understanding of their place in the American rock n roll lineage. They are in the family tree of Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground, to the Strokes and their subsequent bands, with other major branches including Pixies, Nirvana, Weezer, The White Stripes, Iggy & the Stooges, The Runaways, Tom Petty, the Modern Lovers, the Violent Femmes...all in all, six decades of American rock n roll history to draw on and learn from.
The Orwells are also figureheads for what seems to be a Chicago renaissance in rock n roll, which includes their local contemporaries like The Symposium, Twin Peaks, Modern Vices, and The Walters, among others, many of whom have actually come out of the same exact suburb (what’s in the water in Elmhurst?) These bands are bringing inventive, well-styled retro-indie rock to the local Chicago scene and evoke the likes of the Strokes (of course), Interpol, the Unicorns and more, in modern and very exciting ways. The Orwells are currently the best-known and will continue on that trajectory, but I predict this scene will become much bigger nationally in the next few years.
Chicago is still one of the few major American cities not being completely overtaken by skyrocketing rent, and any affordable urban area inevitably becomes a creative hot spot for young artists. It’s still the kind of place where you can devote plenty of energy to being a musician or actor or writer and still support yourself with even just a part-time job. I love that the Orwells are bringing Illinois to the world at large. Forget New York, forget Los Angeles — the Midwest is the future. (It’ll also be furthest from rising sea levels as global warming overtakes the planet.)
Maybe the rest of the country perceives Chicago as a dangerous place to live. That was the same perception (okay, reality) of New York City in the 1970s and 80s, and it allowed for some of the greatest innovations in American music, art, and literature, as people came for the cheap rent and countercultural comradeship. William S. Burroughs living in the same neighborhood as CBGB, The Ramones and Basquiat. But that New York has been choked out by the cupcake shops of the 1%. It’s Chicago’s turn now to revitalize American culture and set the course for the future as we move further into the 21st century. If certain music scenes are about ironic detachment and metamodern meaninglessness, this Midwestern rock revival is taking a stand for sincerity and a return to authentic feeling.
A huge part of rock n roll is honesty in its purest form. In this, the Orwells don’t hold back. They’re polite but iconoclastic. They reject the failures of rock idols and piss people off in the process, like when they were unimpressed with the overly coordinated shows of Arctic Monkeys, and they seek to retain their youthful exuberance after staring down the latter-day dulling of the sounds of their heroes like Jack White. If half of being an artist is about being inspired by your idols, it’s also about learning what you don’t want to become.
The Orwells might have no problem critiquing their contemporaries and idols, but they seem to strive to avoid being perceived as rock n roll assholes. I think the band is hyper-aware of the mythology of rock stars, how easy it is to idolize someone whose songs you’ve listened to thousands of times and then meet in the flesh. They take care to deliver on that mythology to their audience in a sincere way, bringing a ton of energy to their shows, taking pictures and partying with their fans. It’s their dream, it’s their job, and they know apathy and bad attitudes won’t get them very far.
They don’t mind fucking with expectations, though. At the New Year’s Eve show, during the encore, Mario came out with black electrical tape over his mouth while the band played “Who Needs You,” with the crowd shouting every word. I love that they’re already saying fuck you to their own canon, not taking themselves or their art too seriously. They seem eager to get on to the next phase of their career as a band. It will be great to see how they evolve and, yes, mature, as they move out of their teenage years and into some sort of rock n roll adulthood. (If there is such a thing.)
What’s next for the Orwells? I can only see them getting bigger and bigger from here. Browsing the surprisingly varied vinyl selection at the Urban Outfitters in Wicker Park, I thought about how popular Disgraceland could be if sold en masse here, with the Orwells striking that ideal balance between indie cred and the infectious popularity of good rock n roll on the mainstream. Maybe that will be the case with their next album. As a possessive fan (and I can only imagine how their hometown fans feel), I don’t necessarily want them to blow up with a couple uber-popular songs that make their shows sell out because every college bro bought tickets, and I can only hope that their future shows I attend will continue to be in intimate venues (at least sometimes). But I really do want them to get all the recognition they deserve of their unique energy and talents.
I have extremely high hopes for their next album, which they’ve gone on show hiatus to work on. I’m also upset because I want to see them perform live again as soon as possible. (And I’ve been so immersed in them in the course of writing this article that I had a dream that they announced dates in March. I will not be making it to Coachella, currently their only next scheduled performance.) I think as long as they continue to take chances, experiment, embrace their talents, and push beyond their comfort zones, they will be able to deliver on truly great rock n roll. And they should be able to sustain that as long as they don’t lose their sense of honesty.
Even as they grow as musicians and as people, I think the Orwells will continue to appeal, at the risk of using an absurd advertising cliché, to the kid in us. It’s not about being a particular age so much as it is about the spirit of it. It’s about embracing authentic feeling, fun, and freedom. Rock n roll is freedom, freedom in the truest sense, not the kind we heard beaten to death on TV by the likes of George W. Bush during our formative years. And dancing and screaming and sweating at a concert is the last place where you can still feel like a human being that isn’t bought, sold, or processed.
Our country may be falling apart, or perhaps a brighter destiny awaits, but all we have is today. So grab that copy of Disgraceland, grab a beer, and enjoy living. I’m not worried about the future as long as we still have bands like the Orwells telling us it’s okay to hang out with your friends, listen to some good music, and enjoy life. Because at the end of the day, what else is there?
Kickass photos by NYC rock photographer Daniel Topete. You should definitely check out the rest of his excellent pix of the Orwells, Twin Peaks, Mac DeMarco and more at his website. http://www.danieltopete.com/
All songs, videos, and photographs are property of their respective owners, not me.
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