Teeth

I love that song. It has that driving kick and that bass; we tried to make a song without having a snare. It has a few in it, but it’s mainly kick and it’s my breath doing all of the other beats. Tom Morello plays the guitar solo at the end. He’s almost imitating a snare with his guitar.

On a March 2021 Instagram livestream, drummer Ashton Irwin explained:

You know I love The Clash. I love songs where the bass and the drumkit is just slapping, in a dancehall kind of way. You want that Motown feeling on the bass and drums in the pop music we make. You want it to be warm and it needs to make you guys kind of want to dance to it. That’s why, when we kind of discovered the bass and drums is in the front of our contemporary pop at the peel, mixed with falsetto vocal that Luke has and the guitar that Mike plays. All of these things are us working on how to have music in top 40, which is a massive journey for us and we try to do it in tricky ways. “Teeth” is a real stand out of agression and stylistic choice for us… Wrote this with Ryan Tedder. Obviously, “Youngblood” is a bass song, so we’re, like, “bass is now at the front of our pop contemporary style, and it really interests people. No one else was putting the bass on the front of their music as a rock band in top 40, so we were like "we need to stick to the bass, the bass really works for us”, Calum’s stocked… And that’s why this song is so bass-driven, because it was a trend.

In an email sent to subscribers, Calum said the following:

My perfect balance of finding vulnerability with aggression. I wasn’t a part of writing this song, so when I did hear it, I knew Ashton and Luke found another part of the soul of this band. I hope you sincerely love it as much as I do. We are in another growing phase…this time I see it more segregated instead of a collective; in a positive way.