We caught up with Minnesoda duo Durry, who have turned DIY dreams, sibling synergy, and viral fame into an indie rock cinematic universe with their upcoming album This Movie Sucks.

Words & photos by Felix Bartlett | March 30, 2025

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It’s been a whirlwind few years for Durry, the sibling-led indie rock duo who went from recording in their parents’ basement during the pandemic to selling out shows off the back of their viral breakout ‘Who’s Laughing Now’. Fresh off a string of London shows we caught up with the band at Shoreditch’s Rich Mix Cinema, fittingly, given their new album’s title, in a room where, alas, no movies were actively sucking!

So talking about the beginning of the journey. It began in your parents basement during the pandemic. Can you share how that kind of an environment influenced the creation and lead to your debut album Suburban Legend.

Austin: “Yeah, definitely. I mean, so Suburban Legend was a lot about, like, growing up, like it was kind of a lot about looking back at our shared experiences and stuff. And so I feel like being in that environment was actually really good for that—good for reflecting on life and having the freedom of time and all those things that Covid brought. It really helped us find our sound and figure out what we were doing, those early days before the first song really popped off or whatever. And then, yeah, ‘Who’s Laughing Now’ going off kind of set the trajectory of the whole band. It’s been a crazy journey ever since, but it’s been awesome.”

Taryn: “Yeah, it was interesting too. Like, we obviously were in the same house together, and I don’t know if this would’ve happened or come together if we weren’t at the time. This is my first music project ever, and he’s been grinding at it for like ten years. He put in all the work ahead of time, honestly. And so then we were able to do something with that. It is kind of weird—I sometimes have a little bit of impostor syndrome because I feel like I just kind of jumped right in and it worked. And that is not how it goes for everybody.”

Austin: “You brought in the fresh perspective and the excitement that came from me grinding for so long. I was tired of it. But you were excited about it. And so that mix is what made it work.

Austin, having being in the industry for 10 years what are some of the challenges perhaps, and things you’ve learned that led up to that journey? Did that have a big impact on setting up Durry?

Austin: “Yeah, totally. I started my first band when I was 16, and right from the get-go, it’s always been, you know, there’s no money, no label, no anything. We’re just going to make it work. So it was so many years of, well, I can’t hire someone to do this, so I’m going to learn how to do it myself. And now with Durry, we have all these years of skills and things I’ve developed that mean we can do almost everything ourselves—visuals, videos, merch, songs. It’s all got this really cohesive feel because we do it all. And I don’t think that would be possible without the years of grinding and being too poor to pay somebody else to do anything.”

Taryn: “And we still carry that attitude. We’ve just slowly been adding to our toolbox. We’re still working in our parents’ garage, and it’s so far, so good. But we’re curious if we’ll ever hit a limit.”

Austin: “We have an actual ‘toolbox’—a milk crate full of clamps, extension cords, duct tape. All the problem-solving things we do to fix everything is janky and DIY. But we’re making it work.”

Taryn: “We always have it with us. Except here.”

Your music videos have always been fantastic with ‘Who’s Laughing Now’ really telling the story about where you guys came from. With your new album, I feel you’ve continued to do the same especially with your track ‘I Just Work Here’, which has been described as a “minimum wage anthem”. What sort of personal experience inspired that?

Austin: “Yeah, this one kind of started with a song on our last record called Coming of Age, which was about working a corporate job and the soul-sucking nature of that. But I wrote that from an outside perspective because I’ve never had a corporate job—just crappy fast food and retail jobs. So I wanted to write one from a personal perspective. The opening line, If you got time to lean, you got time to clean, is what I was told all the time because I love leaning. Leaning is my favourite pastime. It’s such a universal experience of crappy jobs. Everyone has a crappy job.”

Taryn: “It kind of developed on tour too. People would ask us questions, and we’d be like, I don’t know, I just work here. It became an inside joke. Now it’s on T-shirts. We had a whole pizza party for that song. It’s our brand.”

Your new album, This Movie Sucks. Has a real mix of folk and punk [Polk???] —how did that come together?

Austin: “I really wanted to have a diversified sound throughout the album. We definitely leaned into the heavier punk stuff, but we didn’t want to forget our core pop-rock sound. And I’ve always had a soft spot for folk and acoustic music, so we made sure to include elements of that too.”

Austin: “The goal was to make something cohesive, where every song still feels like a different flavour. We’ve got the core sound of the band, and then we branch out in every direction—so it doesn’t feel like you’re hearing 12 versions of the same track. I’m a firm believer in albums as a whole experience. And to keep people listening from start to finish, variety is key.”

Taryn: “Yeah, this album was so much more intentional. Our first album was more like a collection of singles we grouped together after one song went viral. This time, we really focused on the art of the album as a complete piece.”

Austin: “It was definitely more of a reactive process the first time around—like, ‘OK, that song blew up, now let’s make an album.’”

Taryn: “Exactly. But with This Movie Sucks, we took the time to think about the full arc of it. There’s still a lot of different sounds across the album, but I’m really proud of how cohesive it feels in the end. We weren’t sure at first if it would work, but it really came together.”

The title track, ‘This Movie Sucks’—what inspired that? But also, how does that sort of fit in with the album? I know there are only two tracks out currently as I’m speaking. So in terms of what people can expect next?

Austin: “This Movie Sucks was actually the first song we wrote for the second album, even before the first one had officially come out. We started working on it early, and it was inspired by what happened after Who’s Laughing Now blew up. Suddenly, we were on tour, living the dream, everything moving fast, like we were inside our own music biopic.

“But then the tour ended, and we were right back in the basement. It was that weird whiplash: one minute everything’s cinematic, and the next, you’re doing laundry and wondering what comes next. That’s the part no one ever shows in the movie—the aftermath. There’s no clean fade to black, life just keeps going.

“So the song, and really the whole album, was inspired by that feeling of letting go of the ‘plot’, this idea that life is supposed to follow some perfect storyline. It doesn’t. Sometimes it’s a bad movie, but it’s still a good life. And that’s okay.”

Talking of going viral TikTok has been a huge part of your rise. How has that shaped you as a band?

Austin: “TikTok’s a double-edged sword. It makes things accessible, but you’re kind of a slave to it. After grinding for so long with no success, any amount of it is mind-blowing. I’ll make a TikTok every day forever if it means we get to hold onto this. We work our butts off to make sure the content, the album, the whole journey is one big project.”

Taryn: “We took a six-month social media break last winter. Austin runs all of it, and he needed the brain space. He wrote a million songs instead. Now we have an album.”

Is there a track you’re most excited for people to hear?

Austin: “Honestly, the whole album, but yeah, I feel like I’ve picked a different favourite song in every interview we’ve done. We really do love them all. That said, there’s a track called Bully that’s probably the most aggressive, in-your-face song on the record. It’s full of sarcasm and attitude, and it’s just so much fun to play live.

“Then on the other end of the spectrum, there’s The Long Goodbye, which is this really earnest, acoustic track. I love both of them equally, even though they couldn’t be more different. My hope is that listeners go on that full journey with us, from high to low, and just enjoy the ride.”

Taryn: “Yeah, I was going to mention The Long Goodbye too. It’s such a contrast to Bully, but that’s part of what I think makes this album special. I’m really excited to play it live. Those quieter, emotional moments in a show can be really powerful, and I love getting to share that kind of connection with people.

“I’m also looking forward to playing Monopoly Money. It’s honestly really hard to play—but that’s okay. We’ve been practicing like crazy, and I think it’s going to be such a fun one for fans to sing along to.”

As siblings, are there any challenges working together or is it just as easy as you both make it look?

Taryn: “It’s that easy. A lot of people fight with their siblings, but we don’t. We have an age gap, so growing up, there was no competition. Once I got older, it was like, “Oh, we’re friends now”. Creatively, we can be blunt and honest in a way you can’t with other people.”

Austin: “With other musicians, there’s always tiptoeing. With your sibling, it’s like, “That’s bad. Don’t do that”. But we know we’re still tight at the end of the day.”

The album’s called This Movie Sucks. What’s a movie you think sucks?

Austin: “Okay, rant time. My favourite show growing up was ‘Beast Wars’, in the Transformers universe. Fast forward to the second Transformers movie—they’re in prehistoric Earth, and there’s a tiger. I’m like, “The tiger’s gonna transform!” But it runs away, and over the hill are regular Transformers. Biggest missed opportunity of all time. I’ve been mad for ten years.”

Cinema stopped peaking after Michael Bay’s Transformers. That was it. I don’t know what happened to the world, but everything just it just didn’t, you know, Linkin Park, Michael Bay, that was it.

Austin: “And like Mountain Dew was, was a part of that too.”

And like Mountain Dew was, was a part of that too.

Oh my gosh. I’m kind of going blank on movies right now, but I have kind of a hot topic maybe, I, I really find action movies like, so boring. Like, I just

Austin: except The Matrix. You like The matrix?

Taryn: “I did like The matrix. Okay. We like, watched a bunch of movies like live on YouTube or something recently just we have referenced a lot of movies in a video we did recently, and I hadn’t seen half of them, so I had to get educated. But yeah, there’s a lot of action movies I’ve seen, and I’m just so bored. It’s like they’re fighting and get it. Let’s move on.”

Austin: “But they’re fighting in a cool way. So yes. Thank you. Yeah.”

So no Mission: Impossible?

Taryn: “Nah I’m not into it.”

Austin: “I’m into Mission: Impossible.”

If you could pick one song to perform in a movie, which would it be?

Austin: “There’s a song called ‘Slug Bug’ on the new album, and it is prime for like, a credits rolling. It’s prime for like, epic moment. Like, it’s so perfect for this. I’m going to like, make an edit of it, like for TikTok or whatever, where like it happens, right, with the, like, the Transformers credit roll, you know?

“It’s good. Feels so good. Yeah. We literally wrote that song with like, end credits in mind, for sure. And it’s the last song on the album, so it’s like perfect.”

Taryn: “Yeah, totally. It’s so appropriate. I would also say, totally on the flip side, our album starts with the song ‘Bully’, and that feels like the action-packed start of a movie.”

“We recently made a music video for that song, and it’s so stupid, but it was so fun, and it feels so good. I could see it in a movie for sure.”

Austin: “The music video for ‘Bully’, we got this, like, homemade armour, and we’re running around like we’re RoboCop or whatever. And we have, like, a katana sword, and we’re pretending we’re fighting crime. It’s… it’s very weird.”

Taryn: “You’re, like, wearing a helmet backwards, and we have multisport gear, like hockey pads. Yeah, yeah. It’s awesome.”

And what is your favourite cinema in Minnesota?

Austin: “Okay, there’s this great place — Riverview Theater. It’s a one-screen, vintage theater. Tickets are cheap, and it’s this beautiful community space. The building is old and full of character. We just did a photo shoot there last week, and it was absolutely beautiful. The whole place is gorgeous.

Also, in Minneapolis, they’ve created these miniature Lego versions of different landmarks — and Riverview is one of them! There’s a tiny Lego version of the theater. It’s the coolest thing.”

Taryn: “Yeah, it’s so appropriate. Honestly, I went to Riverview for the first time during that photo shoot. Austin already knew about it and had been there before. But walking in for the first time, it was amazing. It’s so pretty and was the perfect location for our shoot. I really want to go back and fully experience it. It’s definitely a hidden treasure.”

Austin: “It really feels like the magic of movies is still alive there. It doesn’t feel corporate. Everything’s wood-panelled, and the décor is vintage. There’s only one screen, and it’s just awesome. I love it. Riverview Theatre. Check it out.”

And what’s next for Derry in 2025?

Taryn: “Touring. Lots of touring. I can’t wait. We’ve got some tours planned for later this year, and we’re hoping to return to Europe early next year. Nothing’s confirmed yet, but that’s the goal. I’m really excited for people to see our live shows. We’ve been working really hard and want to step things up, maybe even a couple notches.

Also, I’m not super active on social media, so I don’t always see fan reactions. But on tour, we get to talk to everyone face-to-face. That’s so motivating for me. It reminds me that what we’re doing really does impact people — which is easy to forget when you’re sitting at home all winter. So yeah, I’m really looking forward to that.”

Austin: “Yeah, definitely. The live show is kind of the next big step. We’ve spent the last couple of years working on our videos and the album — all the busy work at home. We’ve been touring too, but now we’re really excited to hit the road.

When we get back from this trip, I’ll be building our stage set for the tour. We’re trying to create a setup where we can project video content — little films and stuff — during the show. We’ll see if it works!”

Taryn: “I hope it works. I’ve been kind of nervous about it!”

Austin: “Yeah, I’ve been hyping it up… but hopefully it all comes together. We just want a really dope live show and can’t wait to be out there again.”

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Derry’s new album, This Movie Sucks drop June 27 via Thirty Tiger