Mother Tongues, AKA Charise Aragoza and Lukas Cheung, is a Toronto-based project looking to break fresh ground in the dream pop genre, both out of desire and necessity. “Char and I are both children of immigrants, a factor that has a huge impact on your entire life. You’re confronted with the need to constantly justify your existence, and this permeates into every aspect of your life–including how you create,” Cheung explains. “I’ve been trying to see this as less of an obstacle and more as something that charges your work with an intensity and urgency that otherwise might not be possible. When you grow up not quite fitting into any space, you end up carving out your own.”
Enter Love In a Vicious Way, the forthcoming Mother Tongues album on Wavy Haze Records. A collection of songs driven by the above sentiments but also a longing to recharge a sense of imagination in a time where such vision has failed. “We’re peering into the future and imagining what this world could be,” Cheung explains. “It’s a little William Gibson, a little cyberpunk, it’s lit like a Wong-Kar-Wai film. It’s queer, it’s free, a little goth, everyone’s wearing eyeliner. I like to imagine our record bleeding out of the headphones of some six-year-old in this not-so-distant universe.”
The result, as new single ‘Worm Day’ attests, draws on everything from goth, dream pop, alt rock, psych and cyberpunk, recombining these elements into something novel. A nineties-flavoured retrofuturist image of the years ahead which uses equal parts angst and affirmation to carve out a new space for the artists and audiences so often left behind. Watch the video edited by Lukas Cheung and Carson Teal below:
Love In a Vicious Way is out on the 21st July via Wavy Haze Records. Until then you can find the singles on the Mother Tongue Bandcamp page.
Photo by Feng