In early 2008 the indie rock quartet Tunabunny assembled in Athens, Georgia. Although its founding members had already been friends, they did not begin making music collectively until Scott Creney and Brigette Herron settled into a house outside town and received a collection of instruments from Brigette’s musician father. Mary Jane Hassell and Chloe Tewksbury soon joined the gatherings, prompting the four to form a band in which Herron and Hassell split vocal duties over a loose, high-energy clamor shaped by riot grrrl precedents. Local performances began almost at once, even before instrumental proficiency had fully developed, and the group quickly attracted the notice of Mike Turner, proprietor of Happy Happy Birthday to Me Records. A contribution titled “Outerspace Is the Center of the Earth” appeared on a split 12" with Hulaboy for HHBTM in 2009, after which the self-titled debut album arrived in 2010. Critic Everett True placed that record among his five favorites of the year. Following the 2011 release of the second album, Minima Moralia, drummer Tewksbury departed and was succeeded by Jesse Stinnard, a friend who also served as the band’s recording engineer. The third album, Genius Fatigue, came out in late 2012. The next LP, Kingdom Technology, issued in 2014, adopted a harsher and more electronic character that arose from the songwriting and production use of a “slightly damaged $2500 sound input device fished out of a University of Georgia dumpster.” While work on a further album proceeded, Stinnard’s own band Antlered Auntlord issued Ostensibly Formerly Stunted on HHBTM in late 2015. The Tunabunny sessions produced enough songs for a double album, mixing experimental and arty material with some of the poppiest tracks the group had yet recorded. HHBTM released the resulting 28-song set, PCP Presents Alice in Wonderland Jr, in June 2017.
