Good Teal
They Know Who They Are
Sunset was filling the inside of the garage at Blkburn Dispensary with orange light, casting shadows across the mostly bare walls that were slowly filling with graffiti left behind by the community who used the space. The recently-christened venue looked different before that show than it usually does. Besides the PA, mics, backline, and merch tables you would find before any show, the additional presence of a ladder, tables with screens and lights, and more cables than any one person could manage announced for everyone who entered that something different was going on that night. Scattered across the walls were “Good Teal Rec Club” signs.
Along with Head Check, Sewn Away, Duel, and Depressionista, Good Teal were performing that night to a crowd that was steadily growing outside. They were psyched up and more ready to bring their A game than usual. That night we were stepping into the world of Good Teal and inside Reg Mason’s head to film a music video for a new song.
Good Teal Hardcore
The band is Reggie Mason on bass and vocals, Alex Goldenthal on lead guitar, Curtis Grayson on rhythm guitar and keys, and Shane Stanton on drums. They come from Union and Butler, New Jersey, and were originally a project started by Mason. “Good Teal was initially a secret solo project I was working on during COVID,” Mason said. “One day, Shane cold DM’d me to hang. Four years and a band later, here we are.” Mason had been disillusioned after years of solo work and a previous group quietly falling apart. He needed something new with no precedent, no baggage. What he got, eventually, was Good Teal.
Mason’s path into hardcore ran through his older brother, who played in bands around New Jersey in the late 2000s and early 2010s. “My brother used to play in a few bands here and there,” he said. “I was in his orbit and naturally took a liking to heavy stuff he was listening to. Cold World, Trash Talk, Oathbreaker.” The band describes their sound as “a reversible jacket between punk, garage rock, and anything else that catches our ears,” and that variety is evident in a reference pool that spans decades and genres. When asked about the EP’s influences, Mason rattles off Gouge Away, Converge, Fiddlehead, Palm, Ceremony, Angel Du$t, Portishead, The Hives, Pixies, an eclectic mix on full display in their songwriting. And then, anchoring the whole list, “the Godfathers of this entire thing, Bad Brains.”
Both bands take hardcore aggression and pair it with something looser and more rhythmically sophisticated underneath. Bad Brains built their identity around the idea that hardcore could contain multitudes, openly referencing reggae, jazz, and R&B in their sound. Good Teal are working from a similar premise, pulling from post-hardcore, psych rock, funk, and more, without ever letting the record lose focus or momentum. “Me and Shane are big metalheads,” Alex said of the band’s mixed styles, “and when we met, Reg and Curtis were working on a hip-hop project.” Like Bad Brains, Good Teal are at their core about catharsis through community, and both are fronted by a person whose vocal intensity functions as the emotional center.
Good Teal EP Review
The EP was meticulously self-recorded and produced by the band, then mastered by Matt Filipek (shout out The Witzard for a great article). Eight tracks covering twenty-three minutes and not one of them is weak.
The Good Teal EP opens with “Parasites!” and wastes no time. The guitars are aggressive but precise with a strong melodic tension running underneath, the high-register guitars flying above the pounding rhythm section. Mason’s vocal delivery is rhythmic by nature, “so my hands get the hang of whatever’s going on and then I dissociate from it,” he said. “My vocals are on their own planet when it comes to writing. I see it as two separate sides of the same handlebar to the same bike, just different gears.” The toms are big and forceful, the bass is locked in, and the whole thing moves. Underneath the hardcore surface is something closer to classic rock songwriting logic with hooks, forward motion, and a chorus you can easily identify on first listen.
“Lookout” opens on familiar hardcore ground before deliberately unsettling it. The tempo drops and the guitars thicken, then the track opens up into a lead guitar line with an almost Middle Eastern tonal quality. The double kick that closes the song out hits hard, the kind of song double pedals were made for. “Spouse” is one of the EP’s most ambitious tracks. “The Woods by Sleater-Kinney was a big influence on that song,” Reg told me. “The power behind the guitars on that record, the blowout drums, and the back and forth between the indie-isms in the guitar work but then the heaviness when their choruses would come... kinda flamboyant at times but it crushes.” Like that record, “Spouse” uses clean guitar tones, with light effects and carrying a faint In Utero-era quality, to dynamically change the texture of the song.
“Newark Vs. Brimstone” is a grungy, slightly disorienting instrumental interlude, somewhere between psych rock and a fever dream. Nice moment of pause before what follows. “Excusing The Hurt,” possibly the EP’s most viscerally forceful track. Reggie explained the track to The Witzard:
“The first verse follows me accepting the way that abuse has shaped me in my overall mistrust of people. Recognizing that living with that hurt will, ultimately, do no good and making the self-call to not be a product of the clichéd “hurt people hurt people.” The second verse (featuring my long-time friend and collaborator GINI’) is from the perspective of someone who is still in that headspace to spread as much hurt as possible, in search of empathy. By the end of both verses, both perspectives land on the same word, “excuse.” They don’t think exactly the same, but recognize that they are on that same spectrum—the hurt.”
“Freefall!” is the kind of track that gets people moving whether they’re dancing or moshing, because at a certain tempo those really aren’t so different anyway. The influence of Rage Against the Machine is clearest here, both in Mason’s vocals blending hardcore delivery with an almost hip-hop-like cadence, and in the Tom Morello-esque guitar effects tying the song together.
“Bittersweet” is a modern classic a la “If It Means a lot To You” by ADTR or Neck Deep’s “December” (I said what I said). The band operates with incredible restraint here, and the minimal layering of the track makes each instrument sound more impactful. Mason’s vocals carry their usual underlying intensity even when the delivery is lighter, and the production keeps a sense of weight to the song even at the most open moments. Pulling off a slow, sad song like this isn’t easy but they nailed it.
The title track closes the EP with an explosion of sound after the end of “Bittersweet” before suddenly it all falls away and we’re left listening to Mason’s bass, alone and dominant. The drums and guitars lock in together and Mason pushes his vocals hard, working through the full range of what he’s got. The song is a summation of what the band has done across the previous seven tracks, and it perfectly transitions back into “Parasites!” to get you listening again.
What’s Next for Good Teal
Mason’s ambitions aren’t limited to audio. The band put out five self-produced music videos (so far) for the album, and Reg directed a documentary about the making of the record, an impulse he traces back to a holiday viewing of Licorice Pizza. “The day-in-the-life aspect of it made me feel like I could shoot a movie,” he said, “so why not have the subject be something I’ve already put as much time into as the band? I’m also big into immortalizing things through recordings to prove it happened at all.” The documentary and videos are available on Good Teal’s Youtube channel.
Ask Mason what’s next and the answer is characteristically blunt: “Music. Visuals. Tour. Vinyl. And more fingerboarding clips.” As he says at the end of the final song, “At least we know who we are. Good Teal.”
Good Teal is out now on all streaming platforms and at goodteal.bandcamp.com.