The sound of early-2000s pop-punk is having a moment, from concert venues hosting packed Emo Nights to long-awaited reunion albums from the genre’s forebears. Case in point: just today, I heard a single on the radio from the new Good Charlotte album—which drops today, incidentally, and is their first in 7 years—right after a new single from the 9-years-in-the-making reunion album from Yellowcard and a few songs before one of the 17 (!) singles that Paramore’s Hayley Williams dropped last week. And yes, part of that resurgence is because Millennials have reached the prime age to have their childhood sold back to them. But it’s not just nostalgia: punchy drums, fast guitars, and lyrics about heartbreak you can shout along to in the car never go out of style, and that sound is proving to be an inspiration for a whole new generation.
Case in point: Teenage Joans, a punk rock duo from Adelaide, Australia. There may just be two of them, but singer/guitarist Cahli Blakers and singer/drummer Tahlia Borg make a mighty racket of big, catchy pop-punk melodies, as exemplified on their AIR and ARIA Award-nominated 2023 debut, the emotastically titled The Rot That Grows Inside My Chest. “My Heart’s Dead!”, the band’s brand-new standalone single, finds Blakers and Borg trading lines about the kind of unrequited crush so all-consuming that it makes you feel numb inside: “Stethoscope my silent chest/ My heart’s dead/ Can you make it beat again?” On paper, the lyrics are bleak but the delivery is tongue-in-cheek, backed as it is with a propulsive punk beat and the kind of stomping, buzzy guitar riff that would have gotten a crowd in 2005 pogo-ing like crazy.
Pop-punk energy and lyrical melodrama about heartbreak makes for textbook emo, but Blakers and Borg have crafted something uniquely their own by filtering it though an unexpected inspiration: Kesha, specifically her 2012 album Warrior that birthed the hit “Die Young.” “We basically posed the question—what if Kesha made a song with Blink-182?” says the band. “We really wanted to write a song where there are three main vocal hooks that repeat throughout the whole song and layer over each other at the end for a huge singalong that people can easily pick up at our live shows.” The way those lyrical motifs circle around each other proves infectious. It takes special skill to write a set of fairly minimalist lyrics that still tell a story and nail a relatable emotion, that are repeated enough to drill into your head but not in a way that they drive you nuts. “My Heart’s Dead!” hits that “huge singalong” sweet spot the band was aiming for dead on.
To even better accentuate Teenage Joans’ personalities, the band crafted a DIY music video, “made at home by us, with help from our friends.” The Arts STL is proud to present the debut of the music video for “My Heart’s Dead!”, which you can watch right here:
“My Heart’s Dead!” is the second single released by Teenage Joans in 2025, following the drop of the similarly shoutalong “Sweet and Slow” back in April. The two songs can be found paired together on the usual streaming suspects; here’s the Spotify stream for your playlist-adding convenience:
Teenage Joans have not yet made public any plans for a sophomore LP any time soon, but if the two singles released so far are any indication, it will be something worth getting excited about. | Jason Green
