Kevin Bronson on February 7th, 2019

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Seven or eight years ago, a trio named Future Ghost was making lots of noise in the L.A. scene. And what blissful noise it was — a muscular mix of punk, post-punk, shoegaze and psych-rock, the music of Brandon Tomas, Kim Hellweg and Brandon Hardy came at you beautifully layered and brutally loud. Some degree of renown seemed imminent, but demons intervened. First, there was a dust-up over their band name, forcing the trio to rechristen itself Missing Teen. Then there were the increasing and eventually insurmountable problems with Tomas’ addiction issues.

And before they could release the album they had made with Pete Lyman and Eric Palmquist, Missing Teen went missing. It was 2012.

That album, titled “Future Ghost,” will finally see the light of day on Feb. 15, when it’s released by L.A.’s Chain Letter Collective. Proceeds from the album sales will benefit the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society to honor Tomas’ daughter, who fought a successful battle with the cancer.

The release was put in motion following a conversation between Chain Letter Collective’s Ben Heywood and Hardy, who now drums in Facial, one of the label’s bands. Heywood remembered the trio and their ferocious live shows and wondered what ever happened to the album. It turns out it was just waiting to be discovered.

“I’m happy our friends/fans will hear it,” says bassist Hellweg.

She backgrounded the whole story for LA Record, where the album’s opening track “Like It or Not” premiered: “We’ve had a six-year estranged relationship with our lead singer due to his battle with addiction, and throughout most of that time period I honestly didn’t care if anyone ever heard this record again. Conversely, I’ve always considered it to be one of my greatest accomplishments. There’s a lot of struggle, a fair amount of resentment, and some pretty dark secrets lurking in these songs. Despite our band’s unfortunate end and a grudge that probably lasted too long, I’m actually happy that our friends at Chain Letter are releasing this album so that the people who appreciated what we did can finally hear it.”

Who knows whether Missing Teen will ever play again live — Tomas now lives in Murietta, where he manages a sober living facility — but if they do, it figures that the outsized anthem “Scream White Noise” will again be the touchstone of their set. It’s massive. “That song is when we knew we were a band,” Hellweg remembers, “when we discovered what we were going to sound like.”

||| Stream: “Scream White Noise”

||| Also: Stream “Like It or Not”