Bubble Tea and Cigarettes make music for pumpkin-spice girlies on mood stabilizers. This gauzy pop project is the Seattle-based duo of Andi Wang and Kat Zhang, both Asian immigrants from conservative families who began writing songs to funnel the dark, heavy emotions they couldn’t keep contained in their day-to-day lives. Their sound mixes Nouvelle Vague’s chic dance pop with Mazzy Star’s dreamy indie rock, and it’s accessorized with the soft glamour of City Pop. But while Bubble Tea and Cigarettes aren’t groundbreaking, they succeed in capturing an interesting tension between hypersweet and extremely numb. On “Plane Crash,” from their second album, November’s We Should Have Killed Each Other (Lauren), Zhang’s voice is a soft but claustrophobic whisper, and she sings over subtle flourishes of pop guitar that would feel at home in an early-aughts teen-movie montage about heartbreak and longing: “I like when you kiss / The scars across my wrist.”
The cover art of We Should Have Killed Each Other depicts a girl dressed in a school uniform standing at the top of a concrete structure at dusk with her arms open and her face skyward. She looks like she could let herself fall forward, declare herself to the universe, or scream at the heavens. This profound sense of romanticized precarity echoes in song titles such as “Dead Flowers” and “French Movie.” Zhang sings like she’s only got so much breath left to describe her many hurts and infrequent joys. This is the music of someone who drinks more bubble tea than water and smokes half a pack a day.
Bubble Tea and Cigarettes Precocious Neophyte open. Sun 3/30, 9 PM, Sleeping Village, 3734 W. Belmont, $18, 21+