Chumped

Anika Pyle on vocals and guitar, Drew Johnson on guitar, and Dan Frelly on drums first bonded as childhood companions in Monument, Colorado. Though each had already pursued music through bands or solo work, the notion of forming Chumped only crystallized once Johnson and Pyle relocated to New Jersey. Bassist Doug McKeever, whom Pyle had encountered at a farmers’ market, completed the lineup. After rotating through multiple drummers, the group welcomed Frelly upon his move to Brooklyn, even though he had never played the instrument before. The four members clicked at once and transformed acoustic material each had composed prior to the band’s existence into amplified arrangements. They tracked songs initially for personal use and online circulation until Neil Shulman proposed issuing their self-titled debut EP on his Anchorless Records imprint in late 2013. Frequent shows in Brooklyn and a national tour supporting the EP in early 2014 placed them amid the resurgence of pop-punk and emo. In mid-2014 the quartet entered John Meredith’s DIY basement studio inside his Ridgewood, Queens apartment to record the full-length Teenage Retirement, which surfaced that November after the preceding EP That’s the Thing Is Like....