Indie pop wasn’t always so polished. Before it was playlist-core or drenched in retro Instagram filters, it was charmingly crooked: guitars slightly out of tune, vocals caught somewhere between earnest and embarrassed, drums recorded in somebody’s parents’ basement. It was punk for kids who doodled in the margins instead of spray-painting walls—music with more heart than technique, passed hand-to-hand on cassettes wrapped in photocopied sleeves. Talulah’s Tape, the debut from Good Flying Birds, lovingly resurrects that spirit with a wry grin and a reel of magnetic tape.
The St. Louis band—led by Kellen Baker, with crucial contributions from Susie Slaughter—belongs to a growing lineage of bedroom romanticists who understand that low fidelity isn’t a flaw but a feature. Like their peers in Soup Activists and Answering Machine, they trace their lineage not through the hi-fi shimmer of Mac DeMarco or Alvvays but through early Sarah Records singles, Guided by Voices’ four-track anthems, and the charming chaos of Talulah Gosh (whose name inspired the project’s original moniker, Talulah God). Baker wrote and recorded Talulah’s Tape largely alone between 2020 and 2024, a period that feels embedded in the album’s DNA: isolation, restlessness, and the stubborn desire to make something beautiful in spite of it all.
Each song feels like a tiny Polaroid smudged by time and thumbprints. “I Will Find” brims with girl-boy harmonies that feel airlifted from a lost Heavenly EP, while “Eric’s Eyes” and “Fall Away” blur the lines between shoegaze haze and indie-pop twinkle, as if The Radio Dept. decided to record inside a garage full of fuzz pedals and soda cans. When the band leans louder—on “Golfball” or the gleefully frazzled closer “Last Straw”—they channel the ragged momentum of the Wedding Present without losing the sense that these are pop songs first, noise experiments second.
For all its scuffed edges, Talulah’s Tape never hides behind its lo-fi aesthetic. Baker’s melodies are sharp enough to slice through the tape hiss, and his lyrics capture the sweet ache of early heartbreak and late-night drives. On “Wallace,” he sings, “While we speed down the highway/In your car even after we split up/I knew you’d be true to yourself and you’d go far,” his voice barely rising above the din. It’s that mix of hope and hurt—romance as both salvation and inevitability—that gives the record its pulse.
Even the interludes and found-sound collages, which sometimes interrupt the momentum, feel like part of the world Baker’s building: fuzzy, imperfect, heartfelt. Talulah’s Tape isn’t just an album—it’s a mixtape for the ghosts of basement shows past, a reminder that indie pop’s scrappy beginnings still have a heartbeat. Good Flying Birds don’t just echo their heroes; they add a new chapter to the lineage, where sincerity hums louder than polish and every hiss feels like a heartbeat.
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