Club Eat’s camp, electro-pop knows no bounds

“I think any night can be the perfect night out if you’re with the right people,” Club Eat’s Ren G says. “I’ve made the Irish pub up the street from my house the best night ever with two of my friends. I’ll make the local park the best night ever…”

After all, the New York electro-pop duo made up of Ren G and producer Chicken has a flair for making the most of everything. Emerging from a series of club nights hosted by the duo across the city — their debut was at a Manhattan dim sum restaurant — Club Eat make highly-addictive dance music for the pop girlies. They’ve opened for the likes of Yves Tumor and Ecco2K, partied with Madonna and established themselves alongside Isabella Lovestory, The Hellp, Surf Gang, Snow Strippers and Damon Rush as a new North American musical vanguard that resides somewhere between the underground and the cult status of internet celebrity. Now, Club Eat is set to release their debut album START, out May 12.

Featuring 48th St, Beshken and Harrison Patrick Smith (The Dare), the album opens with the buzzing synths and pulsating bass of “Bleach”, transporting us to an all too relatable state of yearning. “Saving up time, taking up space, when you gonna take me out?”, Ren sings, setting the tone for the album with its infectiously optimistic sound. “We wanted it to function as something to listen to in your headphones,” Ren says, “and we also wanted it to be something you can play at the club at three in the morning.”

The record is undeniably campy, lyrically, and sees Club Eat transcend their experimental dance music roots in favour of START’s witty pop sound. Whether harkening back to the sounds of early 00s electroclash or late 70s No Wave, as Ren’s reminiscing fondly on a suburban parking lot hookup or a boy she saw at the bus stop, the duo maximizes every night, moment, memory and sound they seize hold of. Working with a used Roland Gaia they bought off Facebook Marketplace, Ren says she and Chicken, “milked all the sounds we could out of that machine.” And the synths throughout START reflect the many moods they can extract from a single instrument — at times transmitting a thundering and libidinal bass and at others a sultry smooth, electric guitar-like sound.

On “Sad Song,” which repeats “No sad songs tonight/ The tears on my pillow have dried,” Club Eat show what they’re all about. For Ren — who says she had 80s English bands like The Cure, Depeche Mode, New Order and similarly “sad tone songs” in mind when writing the track — it seems refusing to listen to depressing music and going out instead has a larger positive effect than it may seem. It’s a compelling philosophy, which is why, in the next song, “Clothes”, when she flippantly repeats, “I put clothes on to take clothes off,” we can’t help but resonate with the painstaking indulgence of searching for a new outfit within an exhausted wardrobe.

The duo’s sartorial bent has led to many collaborations beyond music. They recently scored “F-List,” a New York Fashion Week documentary film directed by blogger Meg Superstar Princess and writer, producer and photographer Saam Niami (American Exiles). They also played the Afters for Celine’s Homme Winter 23 show in Paris this February, and produced a new track “Clothing”, for downtown New York fashion collective Lucky Jewel’s SS23 show. “Dollar bins with the couture,” she sings on it.

It’s the simple things — cars, parking lots, thrift store bins, the suburbs, vodka in the Sprite — that make for some of the greatest lyrics on the album. In “Shiny Things,” a rather romantic track about the importance of exhibiting care in a relationship, Ren sings, “Just treat me right / Make me feel like a treasure / Cause I’ve experienced luxury, and nothing can measure… / to the simple things / the regular pleasures / like when you pull up in the Nissan and we ride around together.” In “Wet,” a song technically “just about having sex”, well, there’s just more to it than that: “Oops, looks like we got a big problem / He can’t sleep so gotta put it on him,” Ren sings. “Pussy put him out kinda like a Klonopin / Take his car keys then I go to Baskin Robbins.”

In fact, much of the appeal of START comes from the duo’s nostalgia for the past. Zooming from her family’s home in Long Island, Ren says that she’s recently been getting back into MTV’s The Hills (2006-2010). In the throes of ill New York weather, she’s been having West Coast daydreams, and The Hills both satiates and feeds that desire. But even the sanctity of a first watch isn’t exempt from Ren’s reveries. You’d be happy to know that, despite “regrettably” loving Lauren Conrad in high school, she’s now “so team Audrina [Patridge], it’s like insane.”

After all, purely nostalgic remembrance is boring. One must do some exaggerating, daydreaming or fantasising to make the past as alluring as Club Eat does. Without a little willful optimism, dress up and friends, the Irish pub down the street is just an Irish pub. Although, if Club Eat is playing there… who knows where the night may go.

Credits

Photography Ben Taylor
Fashion Women’s History Museum Vintage