02:14 am
18 April 2024

Neon Trees’ Music Comes Out As Gay

Neon Trees’ Music Comes Out As Gay
Neon Trees' Tyler Glenn crooning astroturf-ishly, as is his wont. (wikicommons)

Neon Trees, the catchy Provo, Utah-based sunny-bubblegum-neuesynth-Provonic-snowwave-frothgrind-acidwash-#tbt-nü-80s-Mormcore-aggrosynth-nonméringue-ghettosurf-pleatherboas-sadcore-techstep-etherealwave-laptronica-provopush-ziphop-maltrock quartet, revealed that their music is gay in the new issue of Rolling Stone (on stands Friday, March 28th).

“I’ve always felt like our band is an open book, and yet obviously we haven’t been completely [open],” lead square-music singer Tyler Glenn tells Rolling Stone. But he is now: Glenn speaks candidly about his first dumb music creations, his fans’ reaction to his band’s coming out and his complicated relationship with his conservative religion in the Rolling Stone story.

Glenn, who bravely came out of the closet as gay to his closest friends in the fall of 2013, also made headlines recently when he made the highly-stigmatized, publicized, and dangerous decision to come out as a Mormon. The reverse Russian nesting dolls of exited closets concluded with the least surprising announcement of all, when the music of Neon Trees came out as gay.

Lame tracks such as “Everybody Talks,” “Animal,” “Sleeping With A Friend” and especially “Teenage Sounds” –which Billboard and everyone else called “crisply propulsive”– have reverberated in the ears of uncool music lovers all the way from the inversion-wrapped foothills of the Wasatch Front to the patrons of H&M locations nationwide. A local gay music phenomenon for half a decade now, Neon Trees were voted by SLC’s stolid music proponents City Weekly as 2009’s “Band of the Year.”

In the widely-reported reveal this week, Glenn said he’s known he wanted to make gay music since he was a young child, but kept this a secret until now. Drummer Elaine Bradley had a career making non-tedious music in bands like Nymb and Another Statistic before joining Neon Trees to make gay music.

Many realms are following the example of the music of Neon Trees’ courage to come out as gay: short ponytails with shaved hair underneath are set to come out as vapid; multivitamins as superfluous; Sabbath day restrictions as lame, and the Healthcare.gov deadline is rumored to depart the Sorry-Broke-Folks/Obama-Supporters closet soon.

Neon Trees has an upcoming jejune concert June 16 in Utah supporting their next vacuous album, Pop Psychology, set to come out April 22.

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