REVIEW: Teethe - Magic Of The Sale

Teethe are stopping to smell the roses, whether you wait for them or not.

45:51 // August 8th, 2025 // Winspear

Ahh, Texas—natural habitat of cowboys, armadillos, wild horses, and, uh, one of the world’s most preeminent slowcore bands (Bedhead, duh). Teethe combines this rich cultural tapestry into a sophomore album that is both packed with panoramic landscapes and lush wildlife, as well as a pace that, depending on whether you prefer a trot or a gallop, may be too unhurried for its own good. Magic Of The Sale does commit the cardinal (modern) sin of placing a slow burn at the very start of the album but likewise succeeds in setting expectations for the kind of energy expenditure you’re in for. The problem is that the pre-release singles—namely “Magic Of The Sale”, with its gorgeous, sweeping chorus, and “Holy Water”, with its upbeat pop appeal—set a different kind of expectation for a more outwardly expressive album. Those songs, however, end up being an exception to the album’s colour palette, not the rule. Lead single, “Hate Goodbyes”, with its tactile arrangements of pedal steel, flutes, and piano, is at least a little more representative of the full picture. Don’t get me wrong, Magic Of The Sale is absolutely enjoyable from start to finish, but it is also much more concerned with nurturing its own secret garden than it is with sending out invitations.

Okay, so some albums require a little more patience and prying to squeeze the juice out of; that’s fine. It can be easy to misconstrue this as a failure on the artist’s part to immediately hook the listener, but more often than not it’s just a case of having to adjust your approach and meet the artist halfway. In the music video for the album’s titular track (which may just be my song of the year), children run through fields of grass, flying kites and swinging from tree branches, locked in a moment of innocent youth when the passage of time felt glacial and unending; would it then be a reach to assume that Teethe are purposefully trying to pull back from the fast-track life and create music that requires the listener to stop and smell the roses to truly enjoy? The album’s artwork (painted in-house by guitarist and vocalist Madeline Dowd) likewise features a spin on Jan Matejko’s infamous brooding jester, but instead of the sad clown in red sitting glumly in the back room of an extravagant ball, as seen in the painting “Stańczyk”, the rolling hills and conflicted horizon now become his backdrop. And so we saunter on, taking in the soft indie textures and allegorical poetry as bumblebees pollinate the white clovers.

This is really the core strength of Magic Of The Sale—its ability to pull gently on the hem of your t-shirt like the shadow of your inner child reminding you to inspect the flora and fauna for teeny acts of magic. Throughout my listening, I rarely stumbled upon a highlight that had me scrambling to check my position on the tracklist, but I also felt consistently placated by its gentle beauty. The whole stretch from “China Day” to the closer blends together like an oil painting, and an argument could certainly be made for trimming the final two songs which only serve to prolong the goodbye, but Magic Of The Sale is greater than the sum of its parts, and it begs the listener to step back and see the forest for the trees. Personally, I could see this record being the perfect accompaniment for quiet Sunday mornings spent reading or tending to your balcony herb garden, but if you’re looking for a dopamine rush, well, there are a thousand other bands that can give you that. Teethe are living in the moment, whether you like it or not.

6.5/10