Tommy Oeffling Drop New Single “Psycho”

Chicago DIY recording artist Tommy Oeffling today shares his final single “Psycho” off his upcoming 8th album, Neighbors, out on October 30th. Oeffling began releasing music in high school, self-released seven albums by age 20, and Neighbors is his first with 22TWENTY — the label home to Oracle Sisters, Cornelia Murr, fellow Chicago artist Wide Orbit, and more.

The Chicago Tribune featured him, writing, “Tommy Oeffling’s music has a familiar, early 2000s aesthetic that sounds indebted to the spirit of Yo La Tengo and Broken Social Scene, as well as contemporaries like Alex G. It’s charismatic, warm, memorable music that may have been crafted as the soundtrack for a neighborhood, but also sounds like the soundtrack to your life.”

Neighbors began as a creative exercise to break free of past songwriting habits. Inspired by James Joyce’s Ulysses, the album depicts a day in Oeffling’s former neighborhood in Milwaukee, sketching out possible lives being lived and examining the small moments in between. Tommy Oeffling said, “Everybody is alive and going through life, but what unites us is those mundane stretches of nothing. Depicting events in my neighborhood was so fun and something I hadn’t really done before. It’s like slowing down time.”

Sound V System wrote of the single, “The song’s muddy overdrive tones run across the entire sonic landscape, over-saturating every texture […] The raw energy found in the song mirrors quotidian life. Real life isn’t polished or perfect. The song is a bop.”

Tommy Oeffling said of the song, “The album version is the first recording I ever did of the song; it was so blown-out and so funny I thought it had to be the final recording. We are completely unable to play this song live and it doesn’t sound good at all. Maybe it’s a bad song, and it’s only good on the album because it’s obliterated with distortion. Who knows?”

While studying to become a teacher, Tommy Oeffling built up his audience, now with nearly 250,000 Spotify monthly listeners. His music often has a carefree, slacker-rock sound, but beneath the surface, Oeffling perfects each sound and plays every instrument himself, down to each guitar strum and hand clap. Taking inspiration from Alex G’s DIY recording ethic, he also cites Sparklehorse, The Radio Dept., and Greg Mendez as his key songwriting influences.

He also looked to Yo La Tengo’s sonic variety while still honing a central sound, saying, “Every song had to be in a different style, but still had to sound like I made it.” Even as the sole artist and instrumentalist, Oeffling says he wants to make his music sound like eight people at once.

Receiving recent support from XRT, Ones To Watch, The Indy Review, and more, KLOF Magazine wrote, “As with most of his catalogue, Oeffling wrote, played and recorded Neighbors almost entirely alone, bringing in friends only for occasional backing vocals. Going in, he set himself one rule: every song had to sound different, while still sounding like him.”

Tommy Oeffling will be releasing Neighbors on Friday, October 30th via 22TWENTY.