Tchotchke: The Best of What’s Next

Before there was Tchotchke, there was the Go-Go’s. More specifically, before there was Tchotchke, there was “Head over Heels.” When she was seven years old, Eva Chambers formed a covers band with her three sisters and began playing the bass guitar. Their instructor, an Angelino named Muddy, recommended they learn “Head over Heels,” which led to them, upon his out-of-the-blue insistence, playing the song for Kathy Valentine over the phone. “She was like, ‘That was great, girls!’” Chambers remembers. “And I was like, ‘Oh, my God???’” She and her sisters would later bring “Head over Heels” to their school’s talent show, not knowing that Charlotte Caffey, whose child was also a student there, was in the audience.

How Chambers met drummer Anastasia Sanchez is just as kismet, if not more filmic: In a PE class a decade ago, Chambers noticed Sanchez’s gray David Bowie shirt and told her how much she liked it. Then, they started hanging out together, and Chambers taught Sanchez how to play Paul and Linda McCartney’s “Ram On” on the ukulele. So they started playing in and forming bands together, writing songs under the banners of Honeycreeper and Shirō Ishii—the latter named after a Japanese microbiologist who became the father of biological warfare, or just “some guy who experimented on people,” Chambers says, laughing. “That was a bad name.” But all of the other band names were less linked to inhumane bacteriological practitioners. They called themselves Mother’s Pride for awhile, which was named after a Fanny album from 1973. Then it was Pinky Pinky, and the “three girls in a garage” even made a fan out of Dave Grohl before releasing Turkey Dinner in 2019.

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As a planned European tour after Turkey Dinner got closer, Chambers and Sanchez, in need of a new guitarist, DM’d Emily Tooraen through a mutual friend on Instagram. They linked up, gelled fast, and hitched it to Paris, playing shows that became a “crash-course on how we’d all mesh together.” It was a relief, Chambers elaborates, to find someone like Tooraen, after the revolving door of previous Pinky Pinky guitarists had become exhausted. “It was like, ‘This person’s amazing. We work so well together. That’s so rare.’” Tooraen affirms Chambers’ impression, saying, “I thought the same way, because I’d played in a bunch of different things—different genres, whatever—but meeting them was a really big step for me.” After a week together on the road, Chambers started wondering aloud: “Are we each other’s musical soulmates?” She got her answer when she, Sanchez, and Tooraen felt united enough to rename themselves Tchotchke in 2020.

“So would you still recommend buying a plane ticket to Paris for someone you barely know?” I ask the girls.

“I can’t imagine doing that now,” Chambers laughs. “But we were pretty young back then. I was like, ‘Oh, we’re not friends with this person. We don’t know them yet. But let’s just spend a month together and see what happens. And thank God. We were pretty ready for anything, because we had experience with all types of band members. Emily was very different from anyone we’d ever worked with, in the best way possible.”

“The puzzle pieces really clicked together in a crazy way,” Tooraen gushes.

The first Tchotchke album, titled Tchotchke in 2022 but recorded as Pinky Pinky two years earlier, was nearly finished by the time Tooraen entered the picture. While some of the songs, like “Don’t Hang Up On Me,” “Dizzy,” and “Longing Delights,” are, in my opinion, some of the best recent glimpses of campy, spandex-tight rock and roll patchwork that don’t veer too far into frolicsome, Vaudevillian imitation, Chambers doesn’t find the record to be an accurate representation of the band, because there were so many different musicians playing on it. She and Sanchez relied on their boyfriends, brothers Brian and Michael D’Addario of the Lemon Twigs, to “fill in the gaps” on arrangements.

When she, Sanchez, and Tooraen started learning those songs as a trio, their sound finally poked through. “It was easier to work out things together and sing the songs together and try out harmonies, because we didn’t have the chance to do that before,” Chambers says. “Everything now is a lot more pre-meditated.” Touring together, Tooraen argues, helped them find their synchronicity. So I ask them how many shows they did after Tchotchke was done. They all burst into laughter. “I don’t even know,” Tooraen chimes in. “Like, 100? Is that even right?” With that ceaseless run of gigs still ongoing, Tchtochke kept putting off their second album.

“Did you feel guilty about taking three years to finish Playin’ Dumb?” I ask the band.

“Yes, until it was done,” Chambers chuckles.

Working with the Lemon Twigs certainly helped get Tchotchke over the finish line. In the time between Tchotchke and Playin’ Dumb, the D’Addarios released two full albums of their own, Everything Harmony and A Dream Is All We Know, and kept up a healthy, if not restless touring schedule. “We were sitting here, like, ‘Wait, what are we doing?’” Chambers says. “Because working and touring, there’s no free time. There’s no energy left to feel even an ounce of creativity. It was, honestly, a very dark period of time. But, finally, we were like, ‘We’re in the second half of our twenties, it’s not fun and games,’ even though it is a game. It was great to have time put aside to finish [Playin’ Dumb], because we hadn’t done that before. It was always, ‘Hey I wrote this thing!’ and nothing gets done. Not in New York, at least.”

Tchotchke’s roots may be in Los Angeles, but their identity is New York now. Sanchez, a “California girl at heart,” says that the West Coast is always still tugging at her, because that’s where her family is, but “moving to New York really humbled the hell out me, us.” “When you’re out here, you’re on your own and it’s very, in a way, isolating,” she elaborates. “There’s also weather here and, in California, it’s always sunshine, rainbows, and lollipops. Here, there’s so much more to lose.” Chambers chimes in, saying that, in California, “it’s very easy to get comfortable, but in New York, there’s no way to ever relax. It’s go, go, go.” That change of pace had a huge impact on Tchotchke’s work ethic when it came time to write and record Playin’ Dumb, as it revealed to them not just time’s true value, but each other’s. “I was bartending for so long and my schedule was completely fucked up,” Sanchez reveals. “I would be waking up at 2 PM and going to bed at 6 AM. It wasn’t sustainable.” She pauses for a moment. “But having each other here, that’s home.”

“I’ve grown to admire the pace here,” Tooraen adds. “There’s an immediacy to life. I’ve heard people say that one day here feels like three or four days somewhere else. That’s definitely influenced the sound of the band, the writing, and how we’ve been inspired. But we found safety in each other.”

Chambers says, “Us all moving out here and not knowing too many people other than each other, it’s like, yeah, we’re gonna get together and work all the time.”

Michael D’Addario said something once about contemporary music “sounding small.” You can hear Tchotchke working to resist that, on songs like “Playin’ Dumb” and “Kisses,” which are roomy and full of depth without sacrificing idiosyncrasies—like the splashes of bicycle horn sneaking into the circus mix of “The Game,” or the harmonies layered like paint swirls on “Skipping Around.” But the finesse is in the D’Addarios’ production, in making the unassuming small details in Chambers’ four- or five-instrument arrangements bigger. Michael is the engineer, “plugging everything in” and chasing a perfect sound. Brian, dubbed the “chord doctor” by the girls, was a lifeline on Playin’ Dumb, showing up to locate missing guitar parts, preserve melodies, and compose the album’s string parts, including the enchanting, swooning “Davide.” Together, the brothers put their near-perfect pitch to good use, fixing flat notes and upscaling Tchotchke’s three-part singing.

The chemistry, musically and romantically, between Chambers, Sanchez, and the D’Addarios has become, as Sanchez puts it, “an ecosystem” of reciprocated work. Tchotchke has gone on multiple tours with the Lemon Twigs, Michael taught Sanchez drum fills, and Chambers designed the artwork for Everything Harmony and A Dream Is All We Know. “Working with them on our first album, we learned a lot,” Chambers says. “I don’t think we would have been able to come up with these arrangements if we hadn’t seen them do it on the first album or all of their other albums. Being with them every single day, it rubs off on you. I’m like, ‘They make it look so easy. Maybe it is easy?’” Together, Tchotchke worked around the Lemon Twigs’ tours, practicing like madwomen and recording Playin’ Dumb across seasons, never in sequence. “It helped with the preparation,” Sanchez explains. “We knew we had just a few days and needed to be ready. Also, recording to tape, you can’t fuck up.”

A lot of the songs on Tchotchke were unfinished, Chambers reveals. “We ended up piling more instruments on top to make them feel full, because it wasn’t completely thought-out.” Some of the songwriting didn’t compliment her and Sanchez’s strengths, either, so, for Playin’ Dumb, they sought to pay more attention to what’s always worked: songs with simple but sophisticated arrangements that are “just the right amount of predictable.” Tooraen speaks up, clarifying that she still loves Tchotchke but hopes the spirit of the band’s friendship is better-actualized on the new material. You can hear it in time-worn spades on balmy, feathery songs like “Other Boys,” “Jealousy,” and “Now I Love You”—tracks that put to bed any worries of incompleteness.

Sanchez worked to fix her pitch on Playin’ Dumb. Being in the Lemon Twigs’ Manhattan studio, especially in the winter and spring months, sprung hurdles onto her. “It’s hard to record in a small, stuffy space—because I have terrible allergies. A lot of the recordings, I was trying to clear my nasal passages and do the best take I could.” And because Sanchez has a self-proclaimed “loud voice, even naturally,” she wanted to change her microphone projection to make room for Chambers’ and Tooraen’s singing to flourish behind hers. Just days before our conversation, Chambers tells me, the girls took their first-ever group vocal lesson together. So what does that mean for where Tchotchke goes next? “It’s going to be an opera album,” Sanchez reveals.

TCHOTCHKE’S MUSIC HITS at a frequency that’s been culturally out-of-phase for 50 years, reaching for techniques and styles that Chambers, Sanchez, and Tooraen weren’t alive to experience firsthand. But Playin’ Dumb is more timeless than it is a replica, and the songs do a good job arguing that relevancy has no expiration date, reveling in a gooey montage of shuffling drums, halo singing, and striping guitars. “The songwriting from back then is much more satisfying and stronger than a lot of the stuff people have written in recent years,” Sanchez says. “We’ve always been drawn to that. It was the obvious route to take.” But an album like Playin’ Dumb doesn’t exist because three girls sat together and decided to chase a ’60s or ’70s sound. It’s just instinct and application. “Not for nothing,” Chambers chimes in, “but everything [of ours] has been recorded to tape. That vintage-y sound is because there’s a ton of compression. This ain’t no GarageBand or ProTools.”

But when Chambers and Sanchez were at art school, they recorded their music digitally, bounced it back to tape, and then bounced it back to the computer. The urge, however, to do something classic was impossible to resist, as they were surrounded by younger bands channeling ideas much older than them. “Some of our really close friends had a ‘60s, Beatles-inspired group with classic songwriting and Motown-style stuff,” Chambers remembers. “Our sound in Pinky Pinky ended up being very garage rock—the 13th Floor Elevators; fuzzy, lo-fi sounds.” And perhaps that is because Los Angeles is a petri dish for ambition, even if there still aren’t that many teenagers making analog records on period-correct equipment. But being exposed to an anomalous creative environment like that, where a city full of kids concocting Merseybeat songs before they can legally drink, is pretty fucking cool. “I think, for young people, music now is so accessible,” Sanchez says. “You can look up whatever you want. The world is your oyster, and it’s easier.”

Tchotchke are an East Coast edition of a nationwide surge, where young bands are making some of the best, most-technically proficient rock music available. The Midwest is likely the nucleus, spitting out artists like Horsegirl, Lifeguard, Friko, Sharp Pins, and Good Flying Birds in the last half-decade alone. I mention these names but Tchotchke do not recognize any of them. “Are these bands?” Chambers asks, genuinely, before clarifying that she’s not very tapped into what’s contemporary. But what she is tapped into is the renewal of musicians playing their instruments live. “The other day, we were at a show, and this guy was like, ‘Rock is BACK!’” she remembers. “He was really excited about this resurgence in guitar acts, as they call them now, which is crazy. If you play guitar, that’s a ‘guitar act.’ I hope everyone’s more attentive to ‘guitar acts.’ I don’t like performances where people play to a track. It’s important for bands to play their own instruments. If everyone’s excited about that again, it’s great news.”

Tooraen wonders if music’s current direction—PR campaigns tailored to TikTok trends, albums that aren’t made with natural instruments, gaming streams for chart notoriety—might explain the supposed “reawakened radicalism” of guitar music. “People are using AI to write their songs,” Chambers quips. “So,” Tooraen replies, “this is, like, the revolution to AI?” Chambers sits with the idea for a moment. “I heard Sharp Pins uses AI to write,” she says, with a streak of grin.

But we’re talking about three musicians flush with so much talent that two albums weren’t ever going to hold all of it. “Did You Hear?” is dive-rock full of punchy riffs and kaleidoscopic pop color. “Poor Girl,” in all its Wilson Brothers circa-1965 charm, ascends with “she-bop” harmonies, chugging drums, and Tooraen’s cresting, face-melting blues solo. A touch of glam glides into the la-la-la’s of “Goodbye,” in a Four Seasons-sings-Boston kind of sugary bedlam. “Playin’ Dumb” sounds like a jingling fantasy that was meant to come out on a Swan Records disc. Tchotchke are the type to care more about the Shaggs or Sapphires than the Top 40, and their music sounds spotless even when they’re playing “Don’t Hang Up On Me” on a xylophone, tambourine, and cowbell with sticks. It’s girl-group flamboyance buoyed by a modern bedroom edge, existing somewhere in the runoff from Milk ‘N’ Cookies, the Tages, and Daughters of Albion. These songs are, in the words of Nick Lowe, in and out of fashion but never out of style.

And while Tchotchke’s music is great, their image is just as so. They call their obsession with clothes “disgustingly girly and cute,” filling their closets with bell-bottoms, bobby socks, and polka dots. “In our teenage bands, you wouldn’t catch me dead in a mini-skirt onstage. Now, that’s the uniform,” Chambers says. “I personally would not go out in a mini-skirt, but for the band, that’s the first thing I pick up.” Playin’ Dumb is as Chambers declares, an album made from “years of pent-up girly material waiting to come out,” and lyrics like “twenty-three and over the hill” and “I should try to amuse his idle pride” come out of Sanchez’s mouth with a “boys go to Jupiter” smile and wink. “It’s quite empowering,” Tooraen says. “Sometimes, with rock music, if you’re a woman, you’re trying to compete with guys. That notion is very tiring to me. With Playin’ Dumb, it was us not afraid to be girly and write girly lyrics. We dressed very colorfully and femininely. It was a freeing experience.”

And instead of letting themselves be pitted against other all-girl bands, Tchotchke considered what it would mean to be a subversive band—how, when everyone is trying to be shocking, being basic becomes profound. “Everyone’s trying to do what’s never been done before,” Sanchez elaborates. “Sometimes, you just lean into the basics and, through that foundation, you can build your own [identity].” In that search for uniqueness, Tchotchke produced the best cover artwork of 2025, at least so far. The image, shot by Max Flick, contains a real Tchotchke board game, designed by Chambers herself and printed by a prototype company, surrounded by trinkets and the hands of a few childhood friends.

Some bands, like Wednesday, @, and Search Results, may be an SEO nightmare, but Tchotchke have been dealing with a far more frustrating name affliction since 2020: Nobody spells it correctly. “It’s the ‘TCH’ that throws people,” Chambers reckons. “It looks like a different language. The second T gets forgotten.” Sanchez perks up. “When we first said, ‘Oh, this is going to be our band name, people were like, ‘Why? No one’s going to know how to fucking spell that,’” she says. “But, it’s not about knowing how to spell, it’s about the music, right?”

Matt Mitchell is Paste’s music editor, reporting from their home in Los Angeles.

Tchotchke: The Best of What’s Next

RIYL: Uni Boys, Horsegirl, The Lemon Twigs, Kate Bollinger