Frank Black Announces ‘Teenager of the Year’ 30th Anniversary Reissue, Playing It in Full on Tour

[Brooklyn Vegan]

Frank Black‘s second solo album, Teenager of the Year, turned 30 this year, and to celebrate 4AD is giving it a new reissue, and Frank will be playing it live, in full, on tour in early 2025.

Says Frank: “Sometime in the early 80s, I’d have to look up the date, I matriculated high school. This school held an awards banquet for some of the departing students at the school. I received an award called the TEENAGER OF THE YEAR award; my brother received the same award the following year. Our award was a 50 dollar credit for textbooks, a TEENAGER OF THE YEAR medallion (my mother still has this), and also the banquet hall dinner, soup to nuts. My brother and I had no complaint about the award (it was given for being all-around-good-guy as best as we could determine). But for such a grand title to be given as TEENAGER OF THE YEAR, I felt the glory had not been amplified enough. In 1993, I was doing ‘solo recording’ sessions with Eric Drew Feldman in Los Angeles.We had settled on a core band with Nick Vincent and Lyle Workman, occasionally augmented by Joey Santiago and Moris Tepper. Though we had to change studios numerous times for actual forest fires and earthquakes, the whole process was such an addictive musical buffet that Eric and I couldn’t stop. We did some vocals at a studio rumored to be owned by Sergio Mendes; in the control room was a wall of television screens broadcasting the brush fire which crept toward us. We eventually evacuated to someplace else. We never met Sergio but we saw him perform a few weeks later when we vacated to Las Vegas after the Northridge earthquake, which had trapped the TEENAGER OF THE YEAR tapes in a studio vault for some time. Our zeal plus empathy from our financiers, they safely observing our travails from London, was enough to keep the money flowing until Eric and I relented and declared ‘Consummatum est.’ We tried to make it grand. 22 in 62. I called it TEENAGER OF THE YEAR. It is 30 years old now, and the original band will perform the record at various venues in early 2025. 4AD has remastered the LP for a fresh printing. Enjoy.”

Teenager of the Year includes Modern Rock hit “Headache” and a lot more. Full details about the reissue have not been announced yet; the album got a Record Store Day reissue in 2019. Watch the video for “Headache” below.

The tour happens in January and February, and reunites most of the players on that album, including Eric Drew Feldman, Lyle Workman and Nick Vincent.

The NYC stop is at Brooklyn Steel on 2/1 and you can get tickets early with BrooklynVegan presale that runs Thursday, July 18 from 10 AM – 10 PM with password HEADACHE. Tickets for all shows go on sale to the general public on Friday, July 19 at 10 AM local time.

All dates are listed below.

Frank Black – 2025 Teenager Of The Year Tour Dates:

January

15th San Francisco, CA The Fillmore
16th San Francisco, CA The Fillmore
18th LA, CA The Orpheum
19th El Cajon, CA The Magnolia
22nd Denver, CO The Paramount
24th Minneapolis, MN TBA
25th Chicago, IL The Metro
26th Chicago, IL The Metro
28th Detroit, MI St Andrews Hall
29th Toronto, ON History
31st Boston, MA Citizens House Of Blues

February

01st Brooklyn, NY Brooklyn Steel
04th Paris, France Trianon
06th London, UK The Palladium