Teens In Trouble break down every track on debut LP 'What's Mine'

Teens In Trouble, the project of Lizzie Killian, has released her debut album What’s Mine on Asian Man Records. The album was produced by Get Married’s Randy Moore, who also played bass and other instruments on it, it features guitar by Mike Huguenor (Jeff Rosenstock, Hard Girls, Shinobu), drums by Henry Chadwick, and guest vocals by PUP’s Stefan Babcock on opening track “You Don’t Want To Mess With Me,” and What’s Mine‘s catchy, energetic indie-punk puts perfectly within that orbit of PUP/Jeff Rosenstock/Asian Man Records style stuff. Lizzie also cites Weezer, Diet Cig, and Lucy Dacus among the album’s core influences, and fans of those artists might wanna check this out too.

For a deeper dive into What’s Mine, Lizzie has given us a track-by-track breakdown of the whole thing. Stream the album and read on for what she had to say…

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Lizzie Killian's Track-by-Track Breakdown of What's Mine

1. “You Don’t Want To Mess With Me”
I wrote this song barely even knowing what the chords were - I was just messing around and I liked the sound of it. I remember coming up with the riff and having to use a reverse chord finder app to see what I was playing. My hope for this song (and the album as a whole) was to push myself and my limits. This is probably the most challenging song to sing, but I really wanted to belt it out. I wrote this about seeing someone new, but being guarded after being hurt in a previous relationship, so you're warning the new person not to mess with you either because you have all this baggage and/or you're not going to tolerate any bullshit anymore. So, it's kind of a love song.

The solo that Randy Moore (who produced the album and also played several instruments on the record) came up with is SO sick and unlike anything I’ve heard before. When he sent me his idea (we were demoing ideas back and forth online for a few months until we got into the studio), I loved it immediately.

After we recorded it, I felt like it was cool but something was missing. We recorded some gang vocals but they weren’t hitting quite the way I wanted to. I was like, “It needs to have more punchiness – like PUP!” And then it dawned on me to maybe ask Stefan Babcock from PUP??? Long story short, he was stoked and came up with some backing vocals and lead guitar and the song rocks. There are literally four guitarists on this track, haha.

2. “Awkward Girl”
“Awkward Girl” was going to be the album opener (like an introduction to myself… like, "Hi, it’s me. I'm super awkward, and here is my art."), but Randy said opening with “You Don’t Want To Mess With Me” would be badass and makes a bold statement as an opener - and this was before we even had Stefan on the song! One of the things I love about this song is that Mike Huguenor (Jeff Rosenstock, Shinobu) had the idea to make the choruses quiet (and compliments the line "it's just me" so well), which blew my mind at the time, but made for a great dynamic between the verses.

3. “Autopilot”
One of the many songs in this album about time and how we use it. With this song, I wanted to use more figurative language, since I tend to be pretty literal in a lot of my songs. So with “Autopilot,” which is about being on autopilot, or your default setting, and not taking an active role in your own life, I was thinking of driving metaphors (“Idling on the street of neglect,” “I’m giving up my license to be on autopilot”). I thought it turned out really fun! And I love the synths and Randy’s solo, as well as Lucy Giles’s (Dog Party) harmonies; it's very Pinkerton-era Weezer B-sides. This song is also SO fun to play live. This is one of my favorite songs on the album.

4. “Brave”
I wrote the lyrics to this song almost entirely on a plane - I was napping on a 9-hour-or-so-flight for a work trip and I woke up suddenly and it felt as though the words just came to me. It’s about a relationship I used to be in, the kind that's hard to talk about even to my therapist of over six years, and yet the words flowed out of me in song, which was a very healing, cathartic experience.

5. “Sick”
This song is just a vibe, and a very Ryan Perras production. Ryan, our engineer and co-producer, is in garage punk band The Atom Age, so this is very much his bread and butter. Huguenor’s lead guitar lines also really make it groove. I had this song written out and Ryan helped orchestrate all the fun percussion and gave really good direction on a lot of the parts. The song has a forgotten attitude that is deep within me that is only starting to come back into the light. It’s bratty and punky. I’d like to do more stuff like this. Tracking vocals for "Sick" was kind of scary and uncomfortable at first, but Ryan and Randy were so supportive and hyped me up. Though, I remember going a little overboard once and accidentally let out a metal growl and they were like “oh no too much!”

6. “In My Dreams”
I’m exploring new territory for myself in this song. I remember writing this shortly after we finished recording our debut EP and recorded a quick voice memo of this song at my parents’ house on my dad's acoustic guitar. I wasn’t sure of the vision for this at the time, but it went from this folky, sing-songwriter-y little tune into a sort of Television-meets-metal ripper. Also, Randy's solo rules. I remember hearing his demo of it and my notes were "Fuck yes" and "Fuck yes" at various points of the solo. This song is huge and heavy and kicks off side B of the record with something a little different.

7. “What Am I Doing?”
Another song about time, which is something I've been struggling with for a while. To me, time is the most valuable resource; it's become especially true for me as I've gotten older, but accentuated since the pandemic. I wrote this song about the paralyzing feeling of having so much to do but just feeling so exhausted. Sometimes we might feel like we're being lazy, but we're actually just burned out from everything happening in life. I think this song turned out beautifully despite being so simple. It's very spacious and has room to breathe, which seems fitting. It has a guitar solo that sings its own melody and evokes a lot of emotion. Lucy did a great job with vocal harmonies in this song. I also love what Henry Chadwick is doing on drums.

8. “Playlist”
A song about songs. I wrote this about a playlist my now-husband made for me when we first started dating and the feeling you get when someone you want to feel closer to shares music with you. Those songs end up getting presented in a new context for you - maybe a song you heard before is on the list and maybe you didn’t think much of it before, but now it has new meaning, and now you feel like you know the person a little more or are more connected to them. There are so many cool little parts in this song.

9. “It’s Up To Me”
This song (along with "Sick") was a song we had to finish writing in the studio together, and it was really fun to piece this together in real time, especially since we had been collaborating remotely on the album over the last three months. We brought in Huguenor to do his thing and had the song playing back while he was figuring out lead guitar parts. I remember being on my phone when he came up with the lead guitar for the outro and everyone stopped and looked at each other just mesmerized. I couldn't help but start laughing because I was just so struck by it. Ryan also pulled out a piece of plywood for Randy, Sim Castro (Kitty Kat Fan Club, The Albert Square), and I to stomp on in between handclaps, which are in the verses. It was nice to have the amount of time we did in the studio because we had room to try a bunch of things, including very silly things - more on that below...

10. “I’m Not Perfect”
Part of writing this song for me was to let go of any sort of perfectionism or pressure to adhere to some unattainable standard. I don’t think of myself as a perfectionist, but sometimes wanting to put your best work out there can be incapacitating. So, this started off as a serious song, which I wrote pretty quickly after a particularly vulnerable moment, but we were able to spend some time with it in the studio and play around. There are guitar harmonies we run in reverse (“reverse guitarmonies,” if you will) over the pre-choruses that are fundamentally pretty silly; not to mention our recording engineer Ryan Perras playing the train whistle in the beginning of the song before announcing, “all aboard!”