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GROWING PAINS
Daniel Loves Mandy Forever (Photo Finish Records)
Add date: 10.13.2026
Release date: 10.9.2026
Links:
Apple Music
Bandcamp
Instagram
Official Website
Spotify
Tidal
YouTube
The debut full-length album from Portland, Oregon-based indie-emo band Growing Pains begins with a pickup truck swerving off the road, lead singer and bassist Kalia Storer asleep at the wheel while her passenger struggles to steady the wheel. “It was already done / You were already gone,” Storer sings on the refrain, unable to overcome her guilt. It’s a template for the many obsessions on Daniel Loves Mandy Forever, which shifts its focus from near-death experiences to romantic deliriums and illusions but treats them as equally all-consuming phenomenons.
“These lyrics are derived directly from real-life feelings of fascination, delusion, real-heart love, and romantic incompetence,” says Storer, who shares lyric-writing with guitarist Carl Taylor. “Sometimes a romantic fixation is so strong that it exceeds language, articulation, and the real.”
The scale of these songs matches their emotional intensity. Across Daniel Loves Mandy Forever, Taylor and Jack Havrilla’s guitar lines nod to the intricacy of midwest emo before erupting into clouds of fuzzy power chords, while Kyle Kraft plays with the crash-heavy maximalism of an arena-rock drummer. Storer’s voice is a hazy, dreamlike presence, her relative calm amid the turbulence building a gently surreal atmosphere.
The band’s influences aren’t buried here—the immediacy of Joyce Manor, the enormity of My Bloody Valentine, the scrappy melodicism of Pacific Northwest indie rock—and their non-musical inspirations are fittingly grand. “Swimming” draws images from a trip to an art museum that Storer and Taylor took together, where they saw a biblical depiction of Jacob wrestling with an angel, and “Crush” is inspired by David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive in which, Taylor says, “Diane’s fascination and love is so strong that it breaks her reality completely.”
The band first met in a Portland School of Rock program in high school, though initially it was just Havrilla, Kraft, and Taylor jamming together—sessions that resulted in some of their earliest songs. Storer was invited in to play bass before taking on lead vocals full time, and the band were quickly playing basements and all-ages spaces around the city, testing out new material. Seven of those early songs comprise their debut record, Heaven Spots, released in 2020, a record alive with the direct, punkish energy of those early shows.
The band stayed together despite soon being divided by the two-hour drive between Portland and Eugene, where Taylor and Kraft were attending the University of Oregon. Their follow-up, the 2023 EP Thought I Heard Your Car, may be three years old now, but it sounds like a fitting introduction to Daniel Loves Mandy Forever: weightier, hookier, more controlled. It was also the first time the band worked with producer Nathan Tucker, formerly of beloved indie band Strange Ranger, who returns behind the desk on Daniel Loves Mandy Forever.
Beneath the fuzz, though, is a fundamental shift in approach this time around. “In the past, a lot of the songs I wrote came from this belief that you have to suffer in order to create something good,” Taylor says. His songs on Thought I Heard Your Car were about a deep infatuation with someone else, whereas “with this album, I had that same type of obsession—but it was over the process of making the music.” To make the record, Growing Pains parlayed six months worth of practise—and dossiers worth of concepts from Storer and Taylor—into a trip to Detroit Lake, Oregon, where they built all these fragments into a cohesive product.
That obsessive approach is clearest on “Bottle Rocket,” the album’s heavy, wistful closer. Storer sings a half-memory of Kraft’s, her voice fading into enormous-sounding, half-pace power chords. It was, Kraft says, inspired by a faint childhood memory of trying to launch a rocket as far as he could, a thought replayed so many times that it has blurred around the edges. “I don’t know if this was a real memory or a dream,” he says. It is Growing Pains’ most striking achievement on Daniel Loves Mandy Forever—an ability to articulate complex ideas by building towering walls of sound around them.
Photo Credit: Maddie Stellingwerf
Apple Music
Bandcamp
Official Website
Spotify
Tidal
YouTube
The debut full-length album from Portland, Oregon-based indie-emo band Growing Pains begins with a pickup truck swerving off the road, lead singer and bassist Kalia Storer asleep at the wheel while her passenger struggles to steady the wheel. “It was already done / You were already gone,” Storer sings on the refrain, unable to overcome her guilt. It’s a template for the many obsessions on Daniel Loves Mandy Forever, which shifts its focus from near-death experiences to romantic deliriums and illusions but treats them as equally all-consuming phenomenons.
“These lyrics are derived directly from real-life feelings of fascination, delusion, real-heart love, and romantic incompetence,” says Storer, who shares lyric-writing with guitarist Carl Taylor. “Sometimes a romantic fixation is so strong that it exceeds language, articulation, and the real.”
The scale of these songs matches their emotional intensity. Across Daniel Loves Mandy Forever, Taylor and Jack Havrilla’s guitar lines nod to the intricacy of midwest emo before erupting into clouds of fuzzy power chords, while Kyle Kraft plays with the crash-heavy maximalism of an arena-rock drummer. Storer’s voice is a hazy, dreamlike presence, her relative calm amid the turbulence building a gently surreal atmosphere.
The band’s influences aren’t buried here—the immediacy of Joyce Manor, the enormity of My Bloody Valentine, the scrappy melodicism of Pacific Northwest indie rock—and their non-musical inspirations are fittingly grand. “Swimming” draws images from a trip to an art museum that Storer and Taylor took together, where they saw a biblical depiction of Jacob wrestling with an angel, and “Crush” is inspired by David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive in which, Taylor says, “Diane’s fascination and love is so strong that it breaks her reality completely.”
The band first met in a Portland School of Rock program in high school, though initially it was just Havrilla, Kraft, and Taylor jamming together—sessions that resulted in some of their earliest songs. Storer was invited in to play bass before taking on lead vocals full time, and the band were quickly playing basements and all-ages spaces around the city, testing out new material. Seven of those early songs comprise their debut record, Heaven Spots, released in 2020, a record alive with the direct, punkish energy of those early shows.
The band stayed together despite soon being divided by the two-hour drive between Portland and Eugene, where Taylor and Kraft were attending the University of Oregon. Their follow-up, the 2023 EP Thought I Heard Your Car, may be three years old now, but it sounds like a fitting introduction to Daniel Loves Mandy Forever: weightier, hookier, more controlled. It was also the first time the band worked with producer Nathan Tucker, formerly of beloved indie band Strange Ranger, who returns behind the desk on Daniel Loves Mandy Forever.
Beneath the fuzz, though, is a fundamental shift in approach this time around. “In the past, a lot of the songs I wrote came from this belief that you have to suffer in order to create something good,” Taylor says. His songs on Thought I Heard Your Car were about a deep infatuation with someone else, whereas “with this album, I had that same type of obsession—but it was over the process of making the music.” To make the record, Growing Pains parlayed six months worth of practise—and dossiers worth of concepts from Storer and Taylor—into a trip to Detroit Lake, Oregon, where they built all these fragments into a cohesive product.
That obsessive approach is clearest on “Bottle Rocket,” the album’s heavy, wistful closer. Storer sings a half-memory of Kraft’s, her voice fading into enormous-sounding, half-pace power chords. It was, Kraft says, inspired by a faint childhood memory of trying to launch a rocket as far as he could, a thought replayed so many times that it has blurred around the edges. “I don’t know if this was a real memory or a dream,” he says. It is Growing Pains’ most striking achievement on Daniel Loves Mandy Forever—an ability to articulate complex ideas by building towering walls of sound around them.
Photo Credit: Maddie Stellingwerf