If the brother-sister duo Durry can somehow follow up 2021’s TikTok smash of a loser anthem, “Who’s Laughing Now,” with something comparable, they might be on a mythological trajectory: just a hit or two away from joining the rarefied air of other legendary Minnesota duos—Paul and Babe, Boone and Erickson, Rocky and Bullwinkle. Maybe that’s the point they were making when they had me meet them at the Blue Ox, their favorite Burnsville sub shop, just across the frontage road from their old stomping grounds, Burnsville Center.
“I worked at Hot Topic over there for a long time,” says Austin, the older of the two, staring out at the center from the sandwich shop’s window. “We used to be true Burnsville.”
Seeing the two of them in the sandwich line together makes me picture another galactic duo. Austin Durry, at 29 years old, is looming over me like an indie sleaze Wookiee, with his scruffy chin, pierced septum, and tie-dyed My Chemical Romance T-shirt, his becoming-his-trademark mullet stuffed under a teal Ducks Unlimited trucker hat. And his little sister, Taryn Durry, 22, is a dashingly femme Han Solo, with her black denim bib overalls and laser-white smile. The two of them were taught how to play their instruments by their trombone-playing Evangelical-band-leader father. But they both say their style comes from their art teacher mom.
“I got the mullet when I first saw Durry’s potential—that was part of the early branding,” Austin says. “Before that, I had medium-whatever hair.”
“OK, mullet boy,” his sister scoffs. “We’re always trying to figure out who we are—we don’t want to be too cool or anything.”
Your lyrics are full of washed-up townie imagery: crow’s feet and prescription pills and too-snug letterman jackets. So much anxiety about getting old and not hitting your potential.
Austin: That’s all taken from doing the band thing for so long and not really going where I wanted it to, not getting bigger.
Austin, you were in another band for quite a while before you two started Durry in 2021, right?
A: Yeah, I was in a band called Coyote Kid for 12 years. We toured. We played SXSW a couple of times. We played summer fests. We did some really cool stuff. But it just never quite caught on. So, all that ended up being a point of stress. Like, Have I wasted my youth on this stuff? It’s ironic that, in feeling that way and processing that, that’s the thing that has launched the career that I always wished I had.
You and your sister were both living at your parents’ house in Burnsville when you formed Durry.
A: When COVID hit, I had planned the biggest tour of my career with Coyote Kid. I had booked 89 shows in the summer of 2020. So that fell through. Then my wife and I moved in with my parents, and I had all the time in the world on my hands. I just started goofing off with synthy stuff and kind of trying to tap into, like, What am I without this band?
Taryn: It did kind of start with us being quarantined together and him just kind of asking for my opinions.
A: I was making, like, bad-sounding demos with synths and drums and whatever. Just ideas, pretty much. Taryn was like my Gen Z vision, right? I’d ask her, “Hey, is this dumb?”
T: “Is this stupid?” “Well, no!”
“I was, like, fake cool. I try to be, but I was in there with all the nerdiest people, making the nerdiest music.”
— Austin Durry
Did you guys both go to Burnsville High?
A: We were homeschooled.
Are you Evangelical Christians?
A: Yeah. Dad was music director at Evergreen Church. Now it’s Hometown Church.
Were you homeschooled for moral reasons?
A: Our parents were teachers in California.
T: Mom was an art teacher; Dad was a music teacher.
A: They didn’t like the education system and how they saw kids getting treated.
T: So, they took it into their own hands.
Did they allow you to listen to secular music?
A: Oh, yeah. It wasn’t, like, a jean-jumper homeschool house.
“Jean jumper”?
A: Yeah. That’s when they wear, like, an ankle-length all-jean skirt, like a dress.
T: [Laughs] I know I’m still wearing overalls, but—
A: —that was not our situation. We were raised to explore the arts and take our own time and to learn what we want to. I ended up doing post-secondary at Normandale College. So that was like my high school.
T: I did post-secondary at Inver Hills, and swimming was a big chunk of my life. I was pretty fast. But I decided to not go to college because I was tired of school. So, I made a rock band instead.
Taryn, were you into your brother’s music before forming Durry?
A: Honesty time.
T: I mean, I wasn’t a big part of it or anything. We’re seven years apart, so I probably had only gotten to three Coyote Kid shows ever. I was, like, 8 years old when he started his first band, Marah in the Mainsail. I didn’t know what was going on. But, I mean, I always thought he was my coolest brother.
A: I was, like, fake cool. I try to be, but I was in there with all the nerdiest people, making the nerdiest music.
Were you annoyed that your sister wasn’t a huge Coyote Kid fan?
A: When you’re doing something as long as we were doing it, family and friends drop off after the first couple of years, and then it’s like, “Yeah, I’m still doing the band thing.” It’s not a big deal.
T: I thought it was cool, but I wasn’t invested in it. So, when he started playing around with this new music, it was weird. I was like, “I’ve never seen such a lighthearted side of you.”
Was your brother kind of a serious person growing up?
T: Not serious. He just looked scary.
A: I used to present myself pretty dark—started getting all these tattoos around 20.
How did it go from offering your opinion to being asked to actually contribute to the songs?
T: He texted me this big chunky text, just like an explanation, like, “I think we should do this. It’d be super cool. Here’s why, da, da, da.”
A: It wasn’t that deep. It was just like, “Hey let’s give it a try, it’d be fun.” And I remember she was looking for a project.
T: It was a big deal for me to say yes to being in this band because I was never super into music growing up. I was more into swimming and sports. I was exposed to music, obviously, but it wasn’t something I pursued. I was actually planning to move to Arizona before all of this picked up.
What were you going to do there?
T: I was going to go work in wilderness therapy with teenagers. I was done with swimming. I was a retail manager for too many years at DSW, selling shoes. So, I was going to do the total opposite and go be a hermit in the desert with a bunch of people. But I mean, in ’21 I decided to not go to Arizona.
A: We did a Kickstarter in the spring of ’21 to record five songs.
T: It did super well.
A: We made, like, seven and a half grand.
So how does “Who’s Laughing Now” hit?
A: We were just coasting—we had a release plan for our five songs coming out. “Who’s Laughing Now” wasn’t even finished; I hadn’t even shown it to Taryn yet. I was just like, “This is pretty cool; I’ll put it on TikTok.” Then that demo blew up.
How did you present it on TikTok?
A: It was just a video of me with an electric guitar playing the first verse. It blew up overnight.
When you say blow up, like, how big?
A: We had 60 listeners at the time, but the video got like 200,000 views. Then the next day, I was like, “Taryn, this is going.” I called up my engineer and was like, “We got to record this today,” because we were trying to release it by the weekend. So we ended up putting it out in three days from the blowup.
Wow.
A: We went from 300 followers to like 6,000 in a day. So, I was like, “OK, let’s capitalize on this, make it a story.” We documented getting the tattoo for the album cover, all this kind of stuff.
Smart.
T: Then a couple of days after that, we made the video in the garage.
A: Posted that right after. That was the one that went up to like 600,000 views or something, and eventually went on to have, like, millions or whatever.
It’s got this insanely catchy 1990s pop-punk edge to it, and the two of you look great in the video—but people are responding to the lyrics, aren’t they? Like this underdog Rocky thing.
A: A lot of people connect with just the mundane vibe. It’s kind of a big reoccurring thing in “Who’s Laughing Now” and “Losers Club” and some of the other songs.
This feeling of being trapped in a job, or not being recognized for the job you’re doing.
A: The flip side of that is also observing the world around you, and not liking it. “Who’s Laughing Now” is kind of a critique of just capitalism in general, just the whole machine. But “Worse for Wear,” that one’s probably the most directly pointed at the boomer mindset of not doing what you want now so that in the future you don’t regret it.
Does this come from an Evangelical perspective? A rejection of worldliness?
A: Man, big question. I guess I see the hollowness in the American dream: this idea of working in the labor force until you’re dead and wasting your entire youth on getting money so you can retire.
T: It’s also just, like, always looking for the next thing over and over and spending your whole life doing that.
Did your parents help you see that for what it is?
A: I don’t know if it’s my parents so much. It’s just observing the world and the lives we see around us.
T: Seeing our parents and how they lived, though, I don’t feel like they were trapped in that either. I feel like they had a very similar perspective.
It sounds like they had a conscious strategy for taking their kids away from all that.
T: They were very intentional.
A: We were also raised really, like, Don’t get caught in debt. Don’t get behind, so that you can have freedom and you’re not trapped in the grind all the time.
How do you make money with Durry? Do you get any money from all those TikTok views? From streaming?
T: We’ve been doing merch drops. Our fans go nuts for T-shirts.
A: In the fall of 2021, we were getting up to 20,000 or 30,000 followers. We had almost every major record label reach out to us. I stopped responding to record labels after a while, because it’s like, I can’t respond to 100 emails at once.
T: It was like we were having Zoom calls with different people all day, every day. It was grueling.
Did you eventually sign with anybody?
A: We ended up finding a good management team. But if we’re going to get a deal from a label, we want to have leverage first. I hear more of bands desperately trying to leave their labels than I do of bands trying to get into one.
You had a hit without one. What are the expectations now? Do you feel any pressure?
A: I mean, I’ve written, like, too many songs. So, we have a full-length record that we’re almost done recording. We’re hoping to put that out maybe this year, maybe next year. For now, we’re trying to continue the life of “Who’s Laughing Now” and get out there and tour and build the fan base.
Does this feel legitimizing to you, this success?
A: Yeah. It’s very vindicating, you know what I mean? I’ve been working on this for so long. Now I finally have some level of, like, we did it.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Three things about Durry
- For better or for worse, the team’s first celebrity amplifier on the socials was Limp Bizkit’s Fred Durst.
- The Durrys have two older brothers—and both of them have normal jobs.
- Austin’s first band was the deeply geeky Marah in the Mainsail. “We made a custom D&D campaign around our albums,” he says.