Freaking Numbers

Kisser is a rock band from Los Angeles, California. Germaine Dunes, mercurial songwriter-producer-scientist-artist singularity–– helms a hard-hitting and unlikely combo of Buck Meek (guitar), Adam Brisbin (guitar), Luke Temple (bass), and Jesse Quebbeman-Turley (drums).

On Freaking Numbers, Kisser’s debut 7” on Bella Union, Dunes’ lyrics conjure fairytales, nightmares, rituals, and games. The band shifts form behind her bewitching bell-like voice on their new tracks Bad Boy Mountain and Ghostgirl.

Germaine Dunes found her way from art school into archaeology, space station development at ESA, neutron research at CERN, and underwater acoustics –– all the while she was writing songs. In the hot fucked-up summer of June 2026, Kisser bloomed in Topanga canyon. At Ringo Bingo, the log cabin studio she shares with Buck Meek, songs first written for a solo project collided with the locus of a shared voice. In one week, in dizzying dozens of takes and all night harmonies and bottomless tea, song after song
after song slammed into place. The players followed each other into cathartic arrangements, and arrested by that freedom, Kisser was born. As if fated, contradictions made immediate sense, and
Dunes’ session had become, suddenly and completely, a band obsessed.

Kisser finds its collaborative architecture through paradox, moving fluidly around genre and expectation. The EP’s spell is both heavy and serene – narrated and concealed. On “Bad Boy Mountain,” Dunes’ voice shouts out, melancholic alongside dueling screeching electric guitars. ––“Fighters / cooking spiders
/ Titan, Thor / Hercules.”

“Ghostgirl” finds sweetness as a buoyant recharge anthem incantation. “It’s winter time baby / I’ll play again once the snow drifts / like puppy eyes, power power up / my demon / rest in me, rest in me / my energy.” But even here, sweetness has its fault lines. Repetition becomes a source for comfort and rupture
– in the tension between desire for closeness and the need for sovereignty.

For fans of Big Thief, Wednesday, Dinosaur Jr., The Breeders