LA-based Tommy Lefroy’s debut album turns economic anxiety into soft rock. Catch them at El Cid.<\/p>\n
Tommy Lefroy is the brainchild of singer-songwriters Tessa Mouzourakis and Wynter Bethel, who are putting a literary spin on soft rock. They\u2019re getting ready to release their first album, The Precariat, this month and have been teasing fans along the way, with their latest single \u201cVacuum\u201d out Friday. They talk with LAist host Nereida Moreno about how economic anxiety inspired this album.<\/p>\n
Tommy Lefroy is the brainchild of singer-songwriters Tessa Mouzourakis and Wynter Bethel, who are putting a literary spin on soft rock. They\u2019re getting ready to release their first album, The Precariat, this month and have been teasing fans along the way, with their latest single, \u201cVacuum\u201d out Friday.<\/p>\n
The name Tommy Lefroy is a reference to the man who is often said to have inspired Jane Austen\u2019s character Mr. Darcy from Pride and Prejudice. Bethel said they wanted to \u201csubvert and embody the muse or the ‘heartbreaker.’\u201d<\/p>\n
Their first album, The Precariat, draws inspiration from the works of economists and social activists. Mouzourakis cites Naomi Klein\u2019s The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism as inspiration for the album because the book talks about people in power capitalizing on disaster. <\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re seeing that now, although we\u2019re kind of in a state of constant crisis,\u201d Mouzourakis said. (Fun fact, the band even hosts book swaps at their shows.)<\/p>\n
Then there\u2019s British economist Guy Standing, who wrote The Precariat in 2011, about a new socioeconomic class facing financial insecurity and instability. Their new album focuses on that feeling of instability they experienced firsthand, such as when Mouzourakis moved to L.A. around the time of the January 2025 fires, which also delayed recording their album.<\/p>\n
Bethel is originally from Michigan\u2019s Upper Peninsula. Mouzourakis hails from Vancouver, British Columbia. The two met in Nashville in 2017 in songwriting circles and started creating music together during the pandemic.<\/p>\n
The time they spent together writing their first EP Flightrisk in London inspired their latest single, \u201cVacuum.\u201d Bethel said when she moved to London, she didn\u2019t know anyone except for Mouzourakis.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe were kind of referencing this sense of us having no community besides each other, the band becoming this focus and this thing that was tying us together,\u201d said Mouzourakis. Bethel adds, “It was a gut feeling that led me to ask Tessa to start a band, and in this song, we’re kind of equating that to sort of blind faith of following someone into the dark.”<\/p>\n
Songs like \u201cSlush Puppy,\u201d the first single off The Precariat, reference the book The Coming Insurrection written by The Invisible Committee and touch on the surveillance state.<\/p>\n
\u201cThings feel sometimes futureless, or it feels so heavy, it feels unbearable,\u201d Mouzourakis said. \u201cWe tried to offer sort of glimmers of hope in community and friendship and the people around you and talking to each other, sharing in this experience, because it is incredibly isolating.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Precariat comes out Oct. 23, and they play at El Cid, 4212 W Sunset Blvd, on Nov. 4. Tickets are around $27.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"LA-based Tommy Lefroy’s debut album turns economic anxiety into soft rock. Catch them at El Cid. Tommy Lefroy…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":483776,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[48,52,51,47,50,49],"class_list":["post-483775","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-los-angeles","tag-la","tag-la-headlines","tag-la-news","tag-los-angeles","tag-los-angeles-headlines","tag-los-angeles-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/483775","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=483775"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/483775\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/483776"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=483775"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=483775"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=483775"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}