Established in California yet headquartered in Brooklyn, the Mystery Lights merge psychedelia with garage rock, honoring the sonic textures of the 1960s while injecting modern wit and raw vitality. Their sound features guitars drenched in fuzz and reverb, vocals that cajole or provoke, melodies both propulsive and hallucinatory, and a wealth of lysergic sonic textures. The band first appeared on record with the 2009 release Teenage Catgirls & the Mystery Lightshow, yet reached wider listeners via the 2016 album The Mystery Lights, a convincingly vintage exercise in garage-psych.
The group’s origins lie in Salinas, California, where guitarists Mike Brandon and Luis “L.A.” Solano assembled the lineup during high school. They developed a personal take on the Nuggets-era 1960s approach, performed locally for several years amid frequent personnel shifts, and eventually issued their debut LP, Teenage Catgirls & the Mystery Lightshow, in 2009. By 2012 Brandon and Solano had relocated to New York, established themselves in Brooklyn, and added bassist Alex Amini along with drummer Nick Pillot. Refining a style rooted in the mid-1960s work of the Kinks and the Easybeats while incorporating expansive psychedelic elements, they began performing throughout the city, cutting several EPs and singles before signing with Wick Records, Daptone’s rock subsidiary, in 2015. Their initial output for the label was the 7-inch Too Many Girls/Too Tough to Bear, followed in 2016 by the self-titled full-length. A second Wick album, Too Much Tension!, appeared in May 2019, by which point Nick Pillot had departed and Zach Butler had assumed the drum chair.
