Only a rock musician with one foot in the 1970s could get away with wearing mirror shades indoors on a cloudy day, but Michael D’Addario, of the critically adored psychedelic rockers The Lemon Twigs, swears he isn’t striking a pose as he dials in.
“You will have to excuse these – they are prescription,” he says of his fashionably dark-and-mysterious eyewear. “I don’t have my regular glasses. I’m not trying to be cool for a Zoom.”
He may protest, but shades on a shady day are on brand for the sibling duo of Michael and his brother Brian, whose fuzzy psych rock applies a Gen Z twist to the genre of power pop, that alliance of bittersweet melodies and jangling guitars pioneered by the likes of Big Star, The Raspberries and The Beach Boys.
“A lot of people probably think we’re in a bubble, some kind of vortex,” Michael says of their vintage vibes. The truth, he explains, is that their music sounds old-fashioned because old-fashioned sounds better.
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“I don’t want to talk about an iPhone in a song. It doesn’t sound good,” he says. “Phonetically, it’s bad. Visually, in your mind, you don’t want to think about it if you’re listening to music. That’s my thing. I like to think of the songs as little pieces of art. I want them to be beautiful, aesthetically and sonically.”
The brothers bring the 1970s bang up to date on their forthcoming album, Look for Your Mind!, a collection of lush power-pop nuggets full of bright melodies and dark lyrics that touch on such diverse topics as heartbreak and the rise of the surveillance state – the idea that nefarious forces are watching our every move and following our every step.
That message is most explicit on Bring You Down, a glam stomper that addresses the ever-greater control that tech bros exert over the lives of everyday people (“the man was made / just to bring you down”). Such paranoia is also on brand for the retro pair, who use the new LP to tap into the claustrophobic spirit of the post-Watergate United States and films such as The Parallax View and Three Days of the Condor.
“There are songs that have that vibe [in a] ‘they’re watching me’ kind of way. Which is a fact of life at this point. It’s the truth,” Michael says. “It’s no longer paranoia, where you can point to someone and say they’re crazy because they feel that way. It’s pretty much a fact of life. There is the capability to get any kind of information they want from you. It’s not paranoia hearing clicks on your phone” – as would have been the case in the 1970s – “or something like that.”
The brothers, who are playing a much-anticipated show in Dublin at the end of the month, are still in their 20s, but have the fashionably laconic air of music-industry lifers as they talk from their homes in New York. Michael is a former child actor who appeared in the HBO series John Adams and the horror movie Sinister, in which he starred opposite Ethan Hawke. Brian notched up early appearances on Broadway, appearing in Les Misérables, as the street urchin Gavroche, and in The Little Mermaid.
They formed The Lemon Twigs at high school and were still teenagers when they signed to the fashionable UK label 4AD, early home to Pixies and Cocteau Twins. Critical acclaim followed. The NME, for example, compared their 2016 debut, Do Hollywood, to Paul McCartney and The Kinks.
But the band squandered some of that early goodwill with their indulgent second record, Go to School, a concept album from 2018 about a chimpanzee raised as a boy.
They followed that monkeying around with the nadir of Songs for the General Public, from 2020, which Rolling Stone decried as “shiny seventies pop-rock simulations”. They parted ways with 4AD shortly afterwards. Barely 20, they were label-less, their best years potentially behind them.
But The Lemons Twigs aren’t bitter. At no point had they ever felt manipulated by the music business, even if it’s clear with hindsight that the industry was more than happy to sell them as precocious adolescents rather than musicians with a long career ahead of them.
“It helped egg us on,” Brian says of their early triumphs and reversals. There’s a benefit to early acclaim, he believes. “You don’t overthink too much. The overthinking comes later. Also, people like the sound of people figuring it out.”
They grew up in Hicksville, the Long Island town perhaps best known for being where Billy Joel grew up. Their mother is a neurophysiologist, their father a musician and songwriter who collaborated for many years with the Irish singer Tommy Makem, aka “the bard of Armagh”, best known for his work with The Clancy Brothers.
There’s a reason people respond to music from the 1960s
— Michael D’Addario
Makem would work with Ronnie D’Addario, a habitue of the New York club scene and someone with a deep connection to the Irish folk community in Manhattan, whenever he was playing in New York.
“Our father was with him a lot. Our parents met at the club in New York that he opened, Tommy Makem’s Irish Pavilion [on East 57th Street]. All these Irish folk singers would come through and perform, and my dad would back Tommy Makem. He did a lot of sound [engineering] for a lot of people.”
That Irish influence filters through to the new album and the song Fire and Gold, which Michael says is heavily influenced by Paul Brady and Andy Irvine’s 1976 version of the traditional protest ballad Arthur McBride. The “vocal inflections on that are unbelievable”, Michael says. “The guitar playing as well”.
He believes that classic American power pop, which traced an arc through The Cars and Fountains of Wayne in subsequent decades, owes a debt to traditional music. You can hear it in the melancholic melodies, the wistfully jangling guitars, the juxtaposition of uplifting vocals and often bleak lyrics.
“The whole power-pop thing is so rooted in folk,” Michael says. “To take something that is more a power-pop thing and bring out those aspects of it in the vocal performance, I thought would be interesting.”
The Lemon Twigs are preparing to cross the Atlantic as the debate about whether rock music is on its last legs rages once more. On the one hand, young people seem more excited by TikTok than by rock’n’roll. On the other, everyone is in a tizzy about the dashingly bedraggled New York group Geese, while The Strokes were the talk of Coachella. Is The Lemon Twigs’ retro rock turning out to be the sound of the future?
“It doesn’t seem as vital at the moment, because there aren’t any groups that people are putting a bunch of money behind,” Michael says. “There might be a few, you know, but there’s only ever, like, one at a time.” He name-checks Geese as a rare exception. “I don’t know the music. They are definitely getting a lot of attention. That’s good.”
As confirmed old-school rockers, The Lemon Twigs are hugely indebted to The Beach Boys, who essentially invented power pop in the early 1960s. Jokey up to now, the D’Addarios turn serious as they recall hanging out with Brian Wilson, the band’s troubled-genius singer, at his home in Los Angeles in the period before his death, in 2025. Spending time with the prodigy who started it all was the experience that sealed their comeback.
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“There was a birthday celebration where his band was playing for him,” Brian says. “He was yelling out songs that he wanted to hear. They brought us up to sing some songs. That was a very surreal thing. We got to meet him briefly. He was super sweet.”
Beach Boys fans will tell you that rock’n’roll peaked in the 1960s and 1970s. The Lemon Twigs are inclined to agree. It wasn’t merely that the songs were better. The way music was recorded was more real – messy, even, in the best sense. It possessed a humanity too often absent from records today. Or so the D’Addario siblings believe.
“There’s a reason people respond to music from the 1960s. Why are there people who don’t take an interest in music and say, ‘I like that old-school sound’?” says Michael. “Why are there people like that? It’s because they” – modern musicians – “tweak so much and make stuff sound so clean. There’s a desire for something to sound a little more organic.”
He adjusts his mirror shades as he says this, no longer a boy wonder, but a veteran who has seen a few things in his decade at the frontline of retro rock. It has been tough, but he and his brother are back and ready to take on the world. This time, it will be on their own terms.
Look for Your Mind! is released by Captured Tracks on Friday, May 8th. The Lemon Twigs play Vicar Street, in Dublin, Tuesday, May 26th, and Belfast Empire Music Hall on Wednesday, May 27th
