The sisterhood duo of Puro Instinct first emerged a couple years ago when Skyler Kaplan was only 14. It does not take much to understand why that made for some easy exposure and some easier press releases. A few pictures of a petite, golden-blonde teenager on a stage coaxing warm-hued dream-pop out of her guitar with a set of sharpie’d ‘X’s on her hands was all the internet needed. They’ve been a permanent meme ever since. Sure the music came first, but music writers adore a backstory like Puro Instinct’s. It fuels a dizzying, vicarious excitement – perfect for projected fantasies. A pretty young girl in an interesting band strikes the core of our universal closed-in music nerd who got through our formative, high school years dreaming you were dating someone exactly like her. Naturally, in almost every interview the questions always surround Skyler; her taste, her record shopping habits, her aspirations – it’s all a conceptual daydream from a population of people who are notorious for their overactive imaginations.

Skyler Kaplan is 16 now, her sister Piper is 23, and they’ve just put out their first record as Puro Instinct called Headbangers in Ecstasy. There’s little to do here about youngness, it does not sound fragile, nor conflicted or scatterbrained. It is not rebellious, or stoic, or even all that confrontational. For all that’s been made of their ages, there’s little that represents juvenility. As a band, Puro Instinct eschew all of those tags, instead they craft glistening, magenta, head-rush girl-pop; calling up folks like Cocteau Twins, Velocity Girl, and My Bloody Valentine. It is not a statement of purpose; they’re making the same bedroom music they were making when they decided to call themselves a band – which, ironically, leaves them a little faceless.

Headbangers in Ecstasy revels in looseness. Babbling, fluorescent guitars, rollicking drums, and gently obfuscated vocals – all tied together in a thin mist of reverb. It can sound like a particularly narcotic dream, with elements like a lazy saxophone croon or a tropic bounce flowing between tracks unhinged to any particular purpose. It’s all delirious and twitchy, but starkly short on hooks. Most tracks, like ‘Everybody’s Sick’ and ‘Stilyagi’ are comfortable to dawdle like murky, half-formed impressions, and the few highlights only stick out in the context of their unflattering company.

The thing is, dawdling can totally work. The similarly-named Pure X put out a record of deeply warbled smudginess earlier this year in Pleasure. They’re kindred spirits in some sense, both come with a tranquilized swagger and a batch of traceable influences, but Headbangers in Ecstasy can feel stilted. There isn’t a lot of room for the listener; things tend to funnel down concentrated, cramped passageways. Tonal, dreamy ambience tends to work best in liberal doses – Puro Instinct want things sharp and isolated, almost like they’re outsmarting themselves.

Here’s the most damning bit. This is the part of the review where I reiterate on the band’s relative greenness and prop them up for a better second effort. But on Headbangers in Ecstasy, you never really get a sense of who these girls are. There’s no personality, no charm, and divorced from their ages, no real intrigue. It’s hard to hope for improvements when you’re not quite sure what you have in the first place.