Daisy the Great Set New Album, Share First Single 'Ballerina'

NYC duo Daisy the Great kick off 2025 with the announcement of their new Catherine Marks-produced (boygenius, St. Vincent, Alanis Morissette) album The Rubber Teeth Talk, which will arrive June 27th via S-Curve Records. Ahead of the album, the band has shared the first single, the spunky, hook-filled anthem “Ballerina."

Driven by the constant societal pressure to be perfect, Mina Walker and Kelley Dugan wrote “Ballerina” to process the smoke and mirrors around perfection in a world of social media. “Ballerina represents a childhood dream of perfection: something that is unattainable, but real enough to give yourself something to compare yourself to,” explains the band. “You look for the ballerina in the search for beauty, purpose, talent, body, and success — and prescribe it to the people you see around you and on social media, who seem to have that air of flawlessness. But the truth is they are also looking for ballerinas because we live in a society that feeds you this idea that even though you’re not perfect, someone out there is.” 

News of The Rubber Teeth Talk arrives on the heels of Daisy the Great’s highly regarded EP Spectacle: Daisy the Great vs. Tony Visconti, an experimental, kaleidoscopic body of work created with Grammy award-winning producer Tony Visconti last fall. What can be heard across The Rubber Teeth Talk’s 11 tracks is Daisy the Great’s limitlessness and utterly infectious and transformative sound. On creating the record, Catherine Marks adds, “We laughed a lot making this record but there were also many moments that made us shed a little tear. When I first heard the songs I was immediately transported into their world. I love the character and sonic identity we’ve created for each song, guided by their storytelling. This album is so undeniably them and I love it.” 

The band will head out on their Spring 2025 Headline Tour on April 1st in Montreal and play across North America, with stops in Montreal, Toronto, Nashville, New York City, and Los Angeles! Find the full list of tour dates below and tickets HERE. 

Daisy the Great Tour Dates

April 1 - Montreal, QC @ Cabaret Fouf (18+)

April 2 - Toronto, ON @ The Garrison (19+)

April 4 - Columbus, OH @ A&R Music Bar

April 5 - Pittsburgh, PA @ Preserving Underground

April 8 - Madison, WI @ High Noon Saloon

April 9 - Milwaukee, WI @ Vivarium

April 10 - Indianapolis, IN @ Hoosier Dome

April 12 - Kansas City, MO @ Recordbar

April 13 - St Louis, MO @ Old Rock House

April 14 - Nashville, TN @ The East Room

April 17 - Atlanta, GA @ Aisle 5

April 18 - Chapel Hill, NC @ Local 506

April 19 - Baltimore, MD @ Metro Baltimore

May 7 - New York City, NY @ Night Club 101

May 21 - Los Angeles, CA @ Moroccan Lounge

Coming off their invigorating first headlining tour, the duo Daisy the Great found themselves back in New York City, finally with a moment to write again. Over the past two years of their lives, the two had constantly collected seeds of songs from dreams and uncanny moments, and were so excited to start to live within this new landscape they had been quietly imagining. As they began to build these worlds together, 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.

Daisy the Great describes 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. 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.”

Photo Credit: Alexa Ondrush

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