Artist

The Pro-Teens

Melbourne, Australia

The Pro-Teens is a music group from Melbourne, Australia. Their discography on Gatefold includes 1 record.

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Photo of The Pro-Teens

1

Albums tracked

6

In collections

—

Since

Biography

Hudson Whitlock set up some mics in a garage in Melbourne and decided to record a cinematic soul record under a fake name with a bunch of College Of The Arts jazz heads. He invented a fictional collective of teenagers from the late sixties, wrote a fake backstory for the liner notes, and tracked the whole thing with a heavy, dust-caked tape hiss. The Pro-Teens were never actually a band of kids. They were a studio front for members of the Melbourne soul boom, specifically players connected to The Cactus Channel and Karate Boogaloo. They did not just play vintage funk. They dragged cinematic library music through a hip-hop MPC filter. The drum breaks on those early College Of The Arts era tracks are stiff, neck-snapping, and completely devoid of the slick polish of modern neo-soul. It sounds like something recorded in a concrete bunker on a four-track tape machine in 1971. That grime is exactly why people started paying attention.

Bio from The Clerk

The Arc of The Pro-Teens

The pivots — what forced The Pro-Teens to reinvent.

  1. The Cinematic Hoax Era

    The 2017 debut Tumultuous Times introduced the world to a band that did not exist. Hudson Whitlock ran the session as a phantom project, burying the live instrumentation under heavy tape saturation to mimic obscure library records. The tracks were short, skeletal, and sounded like they were rescued from a flooded basement in Detroit. It established their signature aesthetic of deadpan humor mixed with incredibly tight, minimal rhythm tracks.

  2. The MF DOOM Tribute

    For the 2025 release MF TEEN, the group shifted focus entirely to pay homage to the production style of Metal Face Doom. They took classic Madlib and DOOM beats and reconstructed them live in the studio with dusty, analog soul instrumentation. You hear this pivot in the way the basslines mimic SP-303 sample chops. The tempos are intentionally loose, dragging behind the beat to capture the exact feel of late-nineties bedroom hip-hop.

Influences

  • Metal Fingers — The Pro-Teens dedicated an entire album to reinterpreting his production work. You hear it in the swung drum patterns and the dusty, looped feel of the basslines on MF TEEN. It is a direct translation of MPC sampler grit to live instruments.
  • Galt MacDermot — The group has repeatedly cited his instrumental work as the blueprint for their library-soul sound. You hear it in the heavy, dry snare crack and the sparse keyboard arrangements on Tactile Living. He taught them how to make a live band sound like a loop.
  • The El Michels Affair — Leon Michels showed everyone how to play cinematic hip-hop covers with a live horn section. The Pro-Teens adopted this exact methodology, trading clean funk chops for cinematic, soundtrack-ready moodiness. It is the bridge between Wu-Tang dirt and Melbourne soul.
  • The Meters — The minimalist, syncopated rhythm section on early tracks like Tumultuous Times is a direct lift from Leo Nocentelli and Zigaboo Modeliste. The Pro-Teens keep the guitar lines dead simple and let the bass and drums carry the entire groove. It is New Orleans pocket play with a Melbourne jazz school pedigree.
  • David Axelrod — His dark, dramatic arrangements for Capitol Records in the late sixties heavily informed Whitlock's production. You hear the influence in the moody, minor-key chord progressions and the cavernous drum reverb on I Flip My Life Every Time I Fly. It is symphonic soul stripped down to its bare bones.

Discography

Their records — most-collected first.

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