Comprised of Upstate New York-born, Los Angeles, CA-based Marissa Longstreet and Los Angeles-born and-based Matthew Lieberman, the Los Angeles-based indie pop duo Rival Cavves can trace their origins to a chance encounter back in 2012. At the time, Lieberman’s new band Magic Bronson was looking for rehearsal/studio space and stumbled upon a warehouse in the San Fernando Valley that seemed to fit what they wanted and needed. Upon their arrival, Lieberman met the warehouse owner’s sister, Marissa Longstreet, who had recently relocated from Upstate New York to the Los Angeles area and was just getting her feet wet in the area’s music scene, fronting an indie dance act. Over the next three years, Lieberman and Longstreet found themselves playing a number of shows together with their respective bands.
As the story goes, in 2005 Lieberman moved into the same North Hollywood neighborhood as Longstreet. The duo began to hang out more frequently and spent a lot of late nights listening to Lieberman’s record collection and introducing each other to new bands. Feeling inspired by these hang out sessions, Lieberman armed with a vintage Roland June-106 synthesizer began making beats and started sending them to Longstreet, who would upload his beats into Garage Band and track vocals over them. Within a few weeks, the duo had a handful of songs and they officially started their latest project Rival Caaves.
The duo’s latest single “Creep” reveals that the duo’s sound is largely inspired by 80s New Wave, synth pop, hip hop and house music, as well as contemporary synth pop as Longstreet’s sultry vocals are paired with slick yet retro-futuristic leaning production featuring Nile Rodgers-like funk guitar, a sinuous bass line, thick shimmering cascades of arpeggio synths and boom bap-like beats. And while clearly nodding at Blondie, Tom Tom Club and Las Kellies, the song possesses a subtly paranoid cynicism rooted in the fear of being hurt and fucked over by someone who may be pretty obvious about how fucked up they are themselves; in fact, as Longstreet says in press notes “People aren’t always aware of how transparent they are online until someone else is seeing through them and then you’re the creep for looking,”
