Tommy Lefroy is the soft rock project of Los Angeles and London based songwriters Wynter Bethel and Canadian, Tessa Mouzourakis. Juxtaposing biting lyrics with dreamscape vocals and sharp compositions, the duo uses distorted fuzz guitars and basement pianos to shape a sound that is at once intimate and cinematic, nostalgic and reimagined.
Tessa met Wynter in Nashville, Tennessee. The two immediately felt the nudge of kindred spirits, and continued to cross paths at songwriting rounds and house parties before finally connecting, both burnt out on the endless almosts of the songwriter scene, to start telling stories of their own. Wynter slid into Tessa’s DMs to propose forming a group in response to her cover of a boygenius track, Ketchum, ID.
Enter Tommy Lefroy, the bookish duo’s chosen moniker, named after Jane Austen’s alleged love interest and original 19th century fuckboy, Thomas Langois Lefroy. Playfully hiding under the guise of Tommy, Wynter and Tessa capture care-not independence in their lyrics and an do-all approach to their creative process.
Leaning heavily on each other through heartbreaks, U-Hauls moving cities and growing up, Tommy Lefroy pulls from the tripfalls of life as aspiring musicians and laughably existential humans, intertwining each other’s narratives with the kind of care that could only come from being the best of friends.
Following in the footsteps of unapologetic female storytellers like Joni Mitchell or Alanis Morissette, the classic sounds of Fleetwood Mac and Tom Petty, or creative contemporaries in the vein of Big Thief and Bon Iver, Tommy Lefroy pulls the best from the heavy-hitters of songwriting grounded in the primacy of lyrics.
Tommy Lefroy’s first single 'Northern Towns' is a track that comes full circle. The song started in Wynter’s kitchen in Los Angeles—clinking glasses from early voice memos are still present in the track—and was finished between Tessa’s London flat and Wynter’s childhood home in Northern Michigan. Wynter and Tessa, originally from Vancouver, bonded early on over nostalgia for notions of Northern places, and misplaced longing for the kind of rugged bravery the duo ultimately seeks just wanted to embody themselves.
Uncompromising, beautifully honest, and contagiously sweet, Tommy Lefroy is a perceptive voice for the malaise of modern love and an inspiration for the confident recklessness that comes with being a storyteller. The stories, written for each other, for their friends, and for the boys who left, come wrapped in the gentle snowfall of love and loss, the fervid storms of tearaway youth, stumbling in and out of love, finding humor along the way.
