Courtesy

Courtesy began in Memphis, Tennessee with a chance encounter via Craigslist. Drew Ryan and Kirk Rawlings met in 2009 to jam, but things derailed once they started trading 4-track scraps, voice memos and dictaphone ideas too embarrassing for band rehearsal. Drums and guitars were resampled, chopped and screwed as the two figured out how to produce tracks. In 2011, the duo released Idmatic—a collection of collage-based pop songs constructed via email, crammed with blown out drumming and stretched cassette wonk.

By 2012, they added A/V wizkid Alex Pilkington and relocated to Chicago, where they recorded Slow Bruise in 2015—an aggressive mix of swampy meditation with pastel highlights. Alex moved to NYC and was replaced by audio engineer Doug Malone to release HEY in 2018, “an unclassifiable electronic blend of off-kilter atmospheric synths, otherworldly vocal harmonies, deep-house grooves, and weirdo-funk bass lines all sewn together via a persistent Oberheim DX drum machine.” (Moon Glyph).

Throughout Courtesy’s catalogue, there is a loose thread that mirrors each album with the evolution of life—beginning with an amorphous single-celled Idmatic, to the cold, lizard-like crawl represented in Slow Bruise, to the exaggerated stumbling toddler of HEY. The instinctual theme is always impulsive and thoughtless—much like the music itself. Back to the core duo, 2021's Check The Milk explores the flip side of convenience and safety through a funhouse lens of candied funk.