Hennessey

Artist Bio

Hennessey is a good old fashioned hipster band from New York. Manhattan to be exact. In the tradition of Le Tigre, Gorillaz, Devo and Roxy Music, they are a group of multidisciplinary artists who have come together to create vintage-pop obsessed electronic dance punk. Leah Hennessey, also known as a playwright and creator of the underground web series Zhe Zhe, is the lead singer and principal songwriter of the band:

“I was writing these brash satirical comedy songs and then I was writing these smol sad songs and I was sick of feeling like a cipher. I needed to be able to write a love song about Jarvis Cocker, for instance, that was clever but also embarrassingly sincere. If you look at like, Prince or Bowie or people like that, there’s no separation between the humor and the feeling.”

Hennessey’s songs are tragically romantic and brutally clever. In the tongue in cheek anthem “Let’s Pretend (It’s the 80s),” Leah screams the mantra “Let’s love like we love money” in the chorus while managing to name check obscure downtown luminaries Lizzie Mercier Descloux and Maripol in the verses.

Synthesizer/drum machine “operator” and Eno-like “non-musician” E.J. O’Hara has been collaborating with Leah “almost since high school”. His main concern is to make the beats sound more like Timbaland.

Electronic guitarist Noah Chevan eschews amplifiers and traditional guitar rigs in favor of computer processing.

“The reason we use drum machines is not to reach any kind of perfection, it’s to bring the Dionysian energy of dance music back into a rock and roll context.” Leah explains. Their live shows are explosive and hypnotic. Chaotic glamour and raw desire. “There aren’t a lot of bands trying to do what we do, so we’re not really in a genre yet”.

If they had to, how would Hennessey describe their music? “Like if Prince produced the Yeah Yeah Yeahs” Leah says, rolling her eyes.

A pretty new band, they’ve already opened for a wide array of New York artists in hipster clubs under the many sidewalks of New York and Brooklyn. They’ve self-released a single “Sleeping Beauty” and were featured for the video in Vogue Magazine. Zhe Zhe is already 6 Seasons Deep on YouTube and Leah Hennessey and director/Bandmate E.J. O’Hara are giving a new name to indie rock with their multi-disciplinary artistic endeavors and achievements.

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