Friendship, Los Angeles and Turkey Dinners: Introducing Pinky Pinky
Thursday, 09 May 2019
Written by Huw Baines
Our childhood friends occupy a special place in our hearts for a whole host of reasons, but perhaps chief among them is the fact that they knew us when we were alternately useless, directionless, and maybe even fun in a carefree sort of way.
They knew us when we were into ska, or when we wore black shirts with red ties, and when we first got our hearts broken. They knew us when we were always half a beer away from heaving an afternoon’s work onto the pavement.
Pinky Pinky’s three members—drummer and vocalist Anastasia Sanchez, guitarist Isabelle Fields and bass player Eva Chambers—grew up together in Los Angeles. They are neither useless, nor directionless. But they are a whole lot of fun.
The band’s debut LP, ‘Turkey Dinner’, is out on June 14 and finds them navigating late teen hang ups, crushes, cars and winsome ideas of escape through a joyful mesh of indie-rock guitars and straight up pop hooks.
“We all went through a number of phases through high school and found a middle ground to pitch all our individual tastes into what we write,” they offer in a group email. “It's helped us to not constrict our music to one specific genre and have the freedom to mess around with different sounds.”
Mess around is right, but it only tells part of the story. Pinky Pinky’s music is loose, weird and exciting, but it’s also exacting and meticulously constructed. Its second single, My Friend Sean, is a doe-eyed paean for the hot dude in class that has more melodic nous than five songs by many similarly-attuned bands. It’s Laurel Canyon chic via wonky psych-rock, and it’s L.A. down to its core.
But that association is perhaps not as cut and dried as it initially appears. Discussing where they fit in their city’s patchwork of bands, Pinky Pinky downplay the apparent hook-first approach that situtates them in the same tradition as venerated hometown heroes like the Beach Boys or the Byrds. It just isn’t that calculated. “It always varies,” they say. “Thinking of a hook sorta came later for us down the line road of writing. Guess usually it’s the other way around.”
At the heart of the record, both figuratively and literally, is the lead single Do Me Dirty (Charlie). A strutting garage-rocker with a sophisticated Crystals-leaning chorus, the song is absolutely addictive while hiding some deep-seated anger. It’s a neat example of pop’s greatest bait and switch: misery masquerading as a pick me up. “This song was definitely meant to show a bit of a sweet disposition,” they say. “The verses that were initially written were a lot more swingy, but we decided to make it a little more rockin’.”
‘Turkey Dinner’ was recorded with regular producers Jonny Bell and Hanni El Khatib, whose label, Innovative Leisure, is also putting out the LP. Together they have helped to wrangle its many moods—Mr Sunday’s squalling horns, the Ringo Starr stomp of All The Birds—while also sidestepping the minefield of interrupting chemistry founded on long-term friendships. “We have a lot of fun working with Hanni and Jonny,” the band says. “We're pretty much just as comfortable with them as we are with each other.”
Pinky Pinky are about to embark on their first UK shows, pairing a headline date in London with a stop at Brighton’s Great Escape and support slots with the Nude Party and Ruby Fields, and they have one message that you’d do well to heed: “Expect the unexpected.”
‘Turkey Dinner’ is out on June 14 through Innovative Leisure.
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