Imperial Teen: ‘We refuse not to be hot’

Three decades into indie-pop group Imperial Teen’s career, vocalist-guitarist Will Schwartz has no interest in acting his age.

That seems particularly appropriate for All Over You, the San Francisco-born quartet’s seventh studio album (out Oct. 9 on Merge Records).

The release, which the band’s promoting with a Bottom of the Hill performance on Thu/15, is playful, restless, physical, and frequently horny, wrapping observations about aging, creativity, and the music business in the fuzzy guitars, buoyant melodies, and overlapping vocals that have long defined Imperial Teen.

Even its title is deliberately suggestive. Are you all over someone—totally over them—or coming all over them?

“I think that’s why we chose it, because it does have all those interpretations,” Schwartz says, coyly.

First single “Overdrive” makes the point more explicitly—or at least more sensually. Schwartz sings, “I just want to get you in the bad light, light you up like a cigarette,” though he pushes back against describing the song as overtly sexual.

“I’d say it’s more like sensuality,” he says.

More interesting to Schwartz is the assumption that pop music, sexuality, and visual self-display necessarily belong to the young.

On Imperial Teen’s two previous records, the band became conscious of getting older and sometimes responded by stepping back from the foreground.

But that self-consciousness appears to have evaporated. “At this point, we made the video for ‘Overdrive,’ and we’re all in it,” says Schwartz. “And yeah, we’re a little older, but I feel like there’s still a sexiness.”

Later, talking about the band’s recent shows, Schwartz puts it more succinctly: “We just refuse not to be hot.”

That attitude has roots in San Francisco, where Imperial Teen formed in the mid-’90s. Schwartz arrived after growing up on the East Coast and in Beverly Hills, attending NYU, struggling with drugs, getting sober, and eventually heading north for an internship at Kiki Gallery, the influential queer art space founded by artist, activist, and cultural impresario Rick Jacobsen.

San Francisco offered something he hadn’t experienced before.

“It just felt like freedom—a sexual awakening,” he says. “I didn’t have anybody watching me, like I did when I’d have to go see my family in LA for the holidays.”

Schwartz didn’t come out to his family until his thirties. In San Francisco, however, he found himself surrounded by queer art and performance. 

Beyond Kiki Gallery, he remembers The Bearded Lady, Josie’s Cabaret and Juice Joint, and seeing performers like MX Justin Vivian Bond and Joan Jett Blakk in a city where queerness seemed to exist in the open.

“There was just all this queer performance and art, and we absorbed it,” says Schwartz.

At the same time, underground and alternative music were pushing toward the mainstream. Nirvana, Hole, Sonic Youth, the Breeders, and other bands demonstrated that pop and rock could accommodate identities and aesthetics that had previously been kept at the margins.

“And Roddy was very out there,” Schwartz says of bandmate Roddy Bottum. “He was just like, ‘Yeah, I’m gay,’ and there really wasn’t anybody else doing that in pop or alternative music.”

Schwartz was younger and initially less comfortable defining himself publicly. When a Spin Magazine interviewer asked whether he was gay, Schwartz wasn’t ready to answer.

“So I gave him a quote: ‘I’m tri-sexual. I’ll try anything sexual,’” he recalls. “I had a sense of ambiguity for the first couple of years.”

Eventually, he decided the vagueness itself had become ridiculous. In a 1998 San Francisco Chronicle interview, he finally embraced the “gay” label.

Imperial Teen nevertheless encountered the limits of the supposedly liberated alternative-rock era. Schwartz recalls radio stations refusing to play the soon-to-be inescapable “Yoo Hoo,” even as the band appeared poised for greater mainstream exposure.

“We were still marginalized as a band, because that’s what the period was,” he says.

Three decades later, the cultural landscape has changed dramatically, but so has San Francisco. Schwartz no longer experiences the city as quite the same refuge he encountered in the ’90s.

“SF is in a really weird space,” he says. “There’s so much income inequality and then the tech thing, and so it seems harder to have that sense of a queer art scene.”

That makes Imperial Teen’s upcoming Bottom of the Hill show especially poignant. The band has been playing the club since the ’90s, and this gig comes as the venue approaches closure at the end of the year.

“I just thought it would be a special thing to play there,” says Schwartz. “It’s just like a marker of the end of an era.”

For a band whose members now live in different cities, simply getting everyone into the same room has become an achievement. Schwartz, Bottum, Jone Stebbins, and Lynn Truell still make Imperial Teen records collaboratively, in various combinations, which means songs can take years to complete.

“It’s really hard to get together because everyone’s so fucking busy,” Schwartz says. “So it takes us, from the conception to the actual finished mix, forever to do it because we have to be really intentional to make it happen.”

What has changed most dramatically is everything required after the music is finished. All Over You arrives in an industry dominated by social media and a seemingly bottomless appetite for content.

“It’s all about creating these little vignettes or these visual representations of the music somehow… and just having these short-attention-span assets to promote the album,” says Schwartz.

Not everyone in Imperial Teen is equally enthusiastic about feeding the beast. So Schwartz is searching for a middle ground: something spontaneous enough to satisfy the demands of social media without becoming phony. 

A quickly shot backstage video for “All Over You” provided an answer. It wasn’t particularly polished or well thought out, Schwartz says, but it felt like them.

Now that the album is done, Imperial Teen will take it on the road, beginning with West Coast dates and continuing through the East Coast before more shows next spring and summer.

For Schwartz, the future beyond that remains intentionally unsettled. He may make another non-Imperial Teen record. He may resurrect his 2000s side project, Hey Willpower, for a few performances. He knows only that he likes to give himself something new to pursue.

That impulse may explain why Imperial Teen has lasted. All Over You sounds like four people who still find something unpredictable in one another—and who reject the notion that growing older requires becoming respectable, sexless, or nostalgic.

As Schwartz puts it, “I think queer people just refuse to not be hot.”

IMPERIAL TEEN Thu/15. Bottom of the Hill, SF. More info here.

The post Imperial Teen: ‘We refuse not to be hot’ appeared first on 48 hills.