Growing Pains Is Not a Teenage Band Anymore

Growing Pains was a clever moniker for a teenage rock group. Formed in 2018 by guitarists Carl Taylor and Jack Havrilla at Portland’s School of Rock project, the band —which also includes lead singer and bassist Kalia Storer and drummer Kyle Kraft—released their debut album, Heaven Spots, before any of the members were of drinking age.

Now, with the band members in their early to mid-20s and having shared the stage with the likes of Beabadoobee and Franz Ferdinand, the name scans less like a cute gag and more like a pledge to never sit still.

Heaven Spots drew from emo, shoegaze and the heavier end of alt-rock, and 2023’s Thought I Heard Your Car incorporated influences from mainstream pop and R&B, not least through a surprising amount of Auto-Tune. But on their latest album, Daniel Loves Mandy Forever, Growing Pains is stripping its sound back to basics.

“When we were doing Thought I Heard Your Car, we were doing a lot of that Ableton shoegaze thing,” Taylor says, referencing the music software program famous for its capacity for gloopy sound design. “It just felt too easy to make, so we wanted to push ourselves.”

Still, Daniel Loves Mandy Forever retains the layers and layers of guitars that defined the band’s early work, when they broke out as leaders of a contingent of young bands kicking heavy guitar into the post-lockdown Portland house show scene.

“Drive” and “Into the Slow Night” explode with fuzz and overdrive. It’s no surprise that both Growing Pains guitarists were mentored by Alien Boy’s Sonia Weber, whose lustrous but scouring guitar tone is one of the most remarkable in the Portland scene. (“They’re making some of the best guitar pop ever,” Taylor says of Alien Boy, who gave Growing Pains a crucial boost early on by booking them on bills.)

Dream pop and shoegaze of the ’80s and ’90s remain clear influences—Storer cites dream-pop legends The Sundays—but Daniel Loves Mandy Forever found the band reaching back to an earlier generation of artists who merged pop smarts with studio experimentation.

“I was really obsessed with the Beatles and a lot of ’60s pop music when working on the songs for the album,” Taylor says. “I think the way that shows is less with the sounds and the instruments but more that we wanted to write timeless love songs.”

That said, there are some Beatle-ish tones if you know where to look: There’s a little bit of Abbey Road in the warbling, Leslie-speaker guitars of “Swimming,” and its chord progressions evoke the more ambiguous White Album tracks, like “Dear Prudence” or “I’m So Tired.”

The album’s lack of digital embellishments and somewhat simplified arrangements also nod to the past.

“We recorded all these songs on a computer, but we wanted it to sound like an album that could’ve hypothetically been recorded straight to tape,” Taylor says. “I feel like in order to create something really inspiring, you have to have some type of limitation.”

Another, somewhat less intentional limitation has played a distinct role in Growing Pains’ sound since day one. The band has always been separated by geography. Their earlier music was recorded when members were living between Portland and Eugene, where Taylor and Kraft attended University of Oregon. Taylor’s in Portland now, but Kraft splits time between Portland and Los Angeles for work.

As a workaround, the band builds its songs from the ground up like a hip-hop beat or a dance track, laying down one instrument at a time rather than jamming together in a room. The resulting sound is densely layered and distinctly of the digital age.

“We went through a tumultuous process of recording, mixing and mastering,” Storer says. “Carl and I really went crazy. We were staying up until two, three in the morning at the studio.”

The band wrote most of the songs during a songwriting retreat near Detroit, Ore., in August 2024; Kraft laid down the first of his drum parts a month later, then the rest of the band members built the songs up into the towering structures we hear on the record. But the very first element to fall into place was the title, which Storer saw graffitied on the underside of a bridge.

Intrigued by the mystery of the two lovers who’d left their mark, Storer started writing love songs, and eventually the entire album expanded to encompass matters of the heart. With Taylor in the middle of his ’60s pop obsession, the songs they started recording together became a classic case of form meeting content.

“We disagree and we fight and we can’t always make decisions, but [the title] was one decision the whole band was instantly down for,” Storer says. “That established a romantic notion for the whole album.”

“When you’re making rock music in 2026, you’re obviously going to be worried about whether or not it’s relevant,” Taylor says. “I think by making simple love songs, it lets you have this feeling that what you make is going to be eternal in some way.”

HEAR IT: Daniel Loves Mandy Forever by Growing Pains via Photo Finish Records. Vinyl $26.