How Do You Sleep At Night? - Teezo Touchdown
Teezo’s long-awaited debut album is a majorly disappointing collection of half-baked ideas stretched out to their very limits
Teezo Touchdown, in recent years, has had a fiery rise to the forefront of mainstream consciousness. He’s done so through boasting eye-grabbing outfits and hairstyles that merge the artist with buckets of iron nails whilst serenading listeners with charming features on prolific albums of artists ranging from Tyler, The Creator to Travis Scott. Teezo’s blend of talk-singing and crooning into impressive ranges has created a distinctive style around the artist that has held many fans in anticipation of his debut album, How Do You Sleep At Night? Unfortunately, however, the album solely hinges upon momentary manifestations of his established sound without adding much beyond that. The resultant work is a release that feels painfully disappointing for the promising artist that fails to launch.
The entirety of the album comes off like a collection of thoughts, all half-complete and trailing off in every which direction. For the most part, Teezo manages to extend these minimal ideas into stretched out complete tracks at the very least, but the sheer stagnation and repetition present on such tracks can be incredibly boring. “OK”, the album’s opening song, is a very pop-punk-sounding cut packed with pop culture lyrics and has an interesting vocoder effect covering the vocals, but that’s it. The sheer existence of these components seem to be satisfactory for the artist, as their assembly is haphazard and the concluding product feels like little more than a disjointed and underproduced Olivia Rodrigo riff. A slight improvement is made, however, on a track such as “UUHH”. The song contrasts with the previously mentioned cut through the added complexity of backing production, as layered vocals form a stronger and fuller background for Teezo to vocally “dance” across. Whilst it is also plagued by the repetitiveness of the simple guitar growls and percussion loop, the intertwining of the multiple other elements and Teezo properly exploring his vocal range to demonstrate attitude and mood elevates the track to a higher level of enjoyability.
Incomplete thoughts are truly the largest problem prominent across many of the album’s offerings. A particularly stand-out example is “Too Easy”, which starts out as a relatively uncomplicated arena rock anthem. The core idea is solid and intriguing upon its entrance, but quite quickly it becomes evident that there is no more development to come beyond the opening moments of the song. Once again, repeated lyrics and looped instrumentals make up the majority of the song’s space. That is, before it suddenly changes into a completely different song halfway through. With no indication, the song drops like an anchor into a quiet section consisting of a longer guitar and beating bass kicks reminiscent of a Brent Faiyaz track. There simply is no reason for this change to occur and neither half feel they like they belong anywhere near the other. This harsh change-up chalks up to no more than a sense that these were 2 individual concepts Teezo had half-formed and decided to mash them together like Dr. Frankenstein to create something that probably should not have been made in the first place.
On “Daddy Mama Drama”, a lack of thoughtfulness and completion of concepts is clearly also on display, although Teezo instead fills the empty space with annoyingly meaningless repeated lyrics. It’s especially disappointing on this track because of the initial promise it boasts. Teezo approaches authenticity and insightfulness as he muses over the estrangement that has developed between himself and his parents tracing back to his adolescence, but he simply arrives at the point of acknowledging it without elaborating or providing any sort of reflection upon it. Instead, song time is spent repeating meaningless lyrics such as “1,2,3,4 wait”. Unfortunately though, those aren’t even the worst lyrics of the album. That title is more aptly given to the painfully meaning-devoid display found on “Nu Nay”, a track which sounds like the background music for a Mario Party minigame filled with lines such as “it’s not all squeaky, sometimes it’s squeaking”, and “party pooper, don’t forget to wipe”.
For all the disappointment this album offers, it cannot be said that it doesn’t at least have moments of enjoyability. While there may not be any tracks that are truly stand-out hits, there are certainly some that are comparatively superior than the aforementioned offending entries. “Familiarity” is an enjoyable, melancholy beach-pop-punk track that exemplifies the best combination of Teezo’s different vocal stylings. There are components of his slightly gruff talk-singing, charming scat-singing, butter-smooth ascension and descension across his melodic range. Background elements such as a gently guiding guitar line and whistles are shiny and placed well, creating a structured soundscape to further bolster the song.
“Mood Swings” is also a pretty fun entry that is packed with a lot of big funk energy. The bouncing, pleasant backing gives Teezo a colorful canvas to move around as he sounds like he’s genuinely having fun and expressing that with a charming attitude. His shiny rises on the inserted “wees” come off like spots of sunshine and youthful exuberance, a power of Teezo’s voice that he doesn’t utilize nearly enough on this album. There is also a quite cool breakdown into dark depths near the track’s end that is summoned to a conclusion by a dramatic drum build that launches the song back into its funky stride.
How Do You Sleep At Night?, despite its moments of enjoyable musicality enriched by Teezo Touchdown’s vocal charm, is a disappointing debut release from an artist who to date has shown so much promise. It’s the unfortunate reality that Teezo quite possibly is the type of artist that can be an insanely valuable asset as a feature to other artist’s works but cannot muster enough artistry to hold up on his own. Most of the tracks on the album’s tracklist comprise of little more than portions of ideas that can’t find their footing or discover any new territory to explore aside from their root. The album manages to keep its head above water and rarely becomes abrasive or in any way painful, but its glaring emptiness definitely can make it tiresome to listen through.