Artist
The Pro-Teens
Melbourne, Australia
The Pro-Teens is a music group from Melbourne, Australia. Their discography on Gatefold includes 1 record.
1
Albums tracked
6
In collections
—
Since
Biography
The Pro-Teens are a collection of professional teenagers from the Darebin area in Naarm (Melb, Aus). They indulge in Dorothy Ahsby, they delight in DOOM, they thrive on The Fabulous Three and postulate on Placebo. Their music reflects that. Utilising the Drum Set, Bass, Horn and many other freaky instruments, The Teens like to explore the gamut of sounds, grooves, moods and genres available. xoxo
The Arc of The Pro-Teens
The pivots — what forced The Pro-Teens to reinvent.
The Cinematic Hoax Era
The 2017 debut Tumultuous Times introduced the world to a band that did not exist. Hudson Whitlock ran the session as a phantom project, burying the live instrumentation under heavy tape saturation to mimic obscure library records. The tracks were short, skeletal, and sounded like they were rescued from a flooded basement in Detroit. It established their signature aesthetic of deadpan humor mixed with incredibly tight, minimal rhythm tracks.
The MF DOOM Tribute
For the 2025 release MF TEEN, the group shifted focus entirely to pay homage to the production style of Metal Face Doom. They took classic Madlib and DOOM beats and reconstructed them live in the studio with dusty, analog soul instrumentation. You hear this pivot in the way the basslines mimic SP-303 sample chops. The tempos are intentionally loose, dragging behind the beat to capture the exact feel of late-nineties bedroom hip-hop.
Influences
- Metal Fingers — The Pro-Teens dedicated an entire album to reinterpreting his production work. You hear it in the swung drum patterns and the dusty, looped feel of the basslines on MF TEEN. It is a direct translation of MPC sampler grit to live instruments.
- Galt MacDermot — The group has repeatedly cited his instrumental work as the blueprint for their library-soul sound. You hear it in the heavy, dry snare crack and the sparse keyboard arrangements on Tactile Living. He taught them how to make a live band sound like a loop.
- The El Michels Affair — Leon Michels showed everyone how to play cinematic hip-hop covers with a live horn section. The Pro-Teens adopted this exact methodology, trading clean funk chops for cinematic, soundtrack-ready moodiness. It is the bridge between Wu-Tang dirt and Melbourne soul.
- The Meters — The minimalist, syncopated rhythm section on early tracks like Tumultuous Times is a direct lift from Leo Nocentelli and Zigaboo Modeliste. The Pro-Teens keep the guitar lines dead simple and let the bass and drums carry the entire groove. It is New Orleans pocket play with a Melbourne jazz school pedigree.
- David Axelrod — His dark, dramatic arrangements for Capitol Records in the late sixties heavily informed Whitlock's production. You hear the influence in the moody, minor-key chord progressions and the cavernous drum reverb on I Flip My Life Every Time I Fly. It is symphonic soul stripped down to its bare bones.
Discography
Their records — most-collected first.
Around the web
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