
Barboza Presents
Daisy the Great
with Special Guests
The Rubber Teeth Talk Tour
Sep 23
Doors: 7:00 PM
All Ages to Enter, 21 & Over to Drink
Barboza
Sep 23, 2025
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DateSep 23, 2025
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Doors Open7:00 PM
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VenueBarboza
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On SaleOn Sale Now
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AgesAll Ages to Enter, 21 & Over to Drink
Coming off their invigorating first headlining tour, the duo Daisy the Great found themselves
back in New York City, tending to their regular lives again. As they reentered the world, Mina
Walker and Kelley Dugan found pleasure and pathos in mundane tasks, like going to the grocery
store, walking anonymously through bustling streets, and sitting alone in their respective
bedrooms. In these unremarkable spaces, the duo found room for introspection, which grounds
Daisy the Great’s sharp and playful new album: The Rubber Teeth Talk. In their transitional
stage, Walker and Dugan paid special attention to the skewed logic of dreams, which bring
unconscious desires to light. These revelations can be both prosaic and profound, delivered with
wit. On the edgy lead single “Ballerina,” Daisy the Great emerge from a childhood dream. “I
wake up at 4:00 a.m. these days, I’ve got a lot on my mind/ Like what’s the point of a body if I’ll
never be a ballerina!” Dugan and Walker scream at the outset, initiating a spiraling synth part
that could soundtrack a nightmarish circus. Those lyrics are but one example of the big
imagination on display on The Rubber Teeth Talk.
Dugan and Walker met as acting majors at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, and they joke that
they “became friends through being business partners.” When they grew closer in their last year
of college, the duo soon found themselves writing an elaborate musical for the fun of it. They’d
meet up daily in the lobby of the Marlton Hotel and “running on cookies and fries,” shared songs
they’d written independently bursting with stacked harmonies and uncanny melodies. The duo
soon realized a single musical couldn’t contain the energy between them and decided to start a
band. Over time, Daisy the Great compiled songs and released their debut album, I’m Not
Getting Any Taller (2019), and alongside their college friends/collaborators, Daisy the Great
taped a Tiny Desk submission video of their song “The Record Player Song.”
“The Record Player Song” blew up on TikTok, then the band released a version with fellow New
York pop artists AJR that went certified gold with over 450 million streams. From there, they
released their sophomore album All You Need is Time (2022), and a slew of singles and EPs,
including Spectacle: Daisy the Great vs. Tony Visconti, which they wrote with the legendary
producer. They’ve collaborated with Claud and Illuminati Hotties on top of touring with the
Kooks, the Vaccines, and half alive, and playing at Lollapalooza and Firefly. Citing artists you
“can’t compare to anyone else” like Fiona Apple, The Sundays, David Bowie, Dirty Projectors,
and Liz Phair as inspiration, Daisy the Great organically grew their audience by being totally
inimitable. On The Rubber Teeth Talk, tight harmonies and a sharp melodic sensibility are the
only rules – every song is a surprising centerpiece in its own right, a reminder that the voice in
itself is an instrument.
The textured production and interlocking double lead vocals stun on “Dream Song,” wherein
Daisy the Great embrace the joyful experience of tumbling through dream wormholes and
landing in scenarios the waking world can never approximate. Their voices entangled, Walker
and Dugan find solace in the uncanny. “It’s about confronting the unknown and not feeling
afraid, and hoping you can hold on to that bravery and self-trust when you wake up. There is a
party in the song.” Contrasting that party is the downcast “Lemon Seeds,” which chronicles the
dissolution of a friendship, the seasick harmony lending the song a sense of intense unease as the
duo confront crisis. “You and me feel like memory/ Spit out the lemon seeds/ Take everything
you need,” they sing to the lost relationship, their voices melding into one. Later, on “Bird
Bones,” the duo grieve the death of a friend, finding the deceased in small things interrupting the
everyday landscape. “Bird bones/In the road,” they sing on the bridge. “Shed his skin and eyes
and tongue/ Does he know he didn’t disappear?”
Daisy the Great describe their songwriting process as diaristic, reflecting their lives moment to
moment, touching on both “big and small things.” To make the album, they wrote together daily,
then shared the songs with bandmates Nardo Ochoa and Matti Dunietz who helped expand them
into fully fleshed out demos. Songs fell into place as the friends shared the details of their lives
with one another, and on The Rubber Teeth Talk, the mundane experiences of the day-to-day
share space with the momentous. Daisy the Great dreamed of working with award-winning
producer Catherine Marks, and patiently waited a year for her to be available. Marks came to
New York for preproduction and the band worked out songs in Dunietz’s basement studio, then
they decamped to Studio G in Brooklyn in what they describe as a “homegrown” process. “The
whole band came every day, even if they weren’t recording. It felt like such a family. We joked,
bickered, and jammed, taking time to find really cool sounds as we knew we wanted the record
to be super lush and full of little pockets – different worlds.” Though the lyrics on this album
emerge from Dugan and Walker’s individual experiences, they relate to one another intimately,
as friends and artists. “A lot of the album is about self-perception, comparison, and insecurity in
some way. There’s also a thread about fear and trusting yourself that things will be okay.
Trusting that it’s an adventure, or a journey, and finding a way to stick around through the
messiness.”
The funky, bass-driven “Swinging” embraces that sense of adventure. Inspired by a time Dugan
was administered too much laughing gas at the dentist, the chorus confronts the fear of the
unknown: “I’m scared but, I’m swinging.” In the moment, Dugan felt as if she had fallen “down
a giant black hole,” and was looking up trying to find the light. The Rubber Teeth Talk finds a
vast spectrum of it, bathing the listener in a sense of security despite life’s many uncertainties.
Album opener “Dog” boasts some of the most memorable lyricism of Daisy the Great’s career.
“My closest kinship with the Winnie the Pooh face down on the sidewalk,” the duo sings,
recounting a bummer day trawling the streets of New York. “Tell me the truth, is it all just talk
talk talk.” The radiant chorus belies any semblance of sorrow leading up to it. The truth is
mercurial, but like dreams, the open-hearted, curious songs of Daisy the Great nudge us ever
closer to it.
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