Southern California six-piece Dutch Interior write songs that expand upon release, creating music that can feel both outside of space and time yet deeply connected to it. Today, the group of lifelong friends — Jack Nugent, Conner Reeves, Davis Stewart, Noah Kurtz, and brothers Shaneand Hayden Barton — announce their new EP, It’s Glass, out March 6th via Fat Possum, and release the new single/video, “Ground Scores.” Following last year’s Moneyball, an album that straddles “the line between traditional country sounds and introverted slowcore, as much influenced by indie-pop melodies as it is by edgier rock experimentation” (FLOOD), It’s Glass builds upon these foundations, sounding both bigger and more intimate, with five tracks that fit together as much as they color outside the lines.
Whereas Moneyball was made within the confines of Dutch Interior’s self-built Long Beach Studio, It’s Glass was recorded at Hyde Street Studios in San Francisco, renowned for hosting the likes of Neil Young, the Grateful Dead, and Willie Nelson. Having access to a professional studio with a myriad of new gear allowed the band to forge ahead with new ideas without losing any of their endearing homespun quality. Access to an organ and grand piano broadened the technical horizons of their sound.
Songwriting boiled down to the band’s steadfast faith in their own personal connection, and the beauty that comes from unexpected moments in the studio, allowing many of the tracks to take on a shape of their own. “A lot of music recycles the same chords and melodic tendencies. It’s the emotion poured into these songs and the environment from which they are captured which makes them sound unique,” they comment. This amorphous quality of these “weird little songs,” as the band describes them, is what makes Dutch Interior special; the tracks can feel like a lofty exhale or a fragile manifestation, as on today’s single, “Ground Scores,” a cautiously optimistic and straightforward love song.
“‘Ground Scores’ is a love song, but it’s also a song about stumbling through the end times into something good,” the band comments. “It was inspired by finding something valuable and unexpected on the ground one night. I realized that this chance occurrence represented how life felt when things were going well: finite happiness left behind by someone else, only to be inevitably depleted.” “Ground Scores” follows an early EP preview, the “thoughtful, bucolic indie rock” (Stereogum) number, “Play The Song.”
As Paste sums it up, “Dutch Interior hit the mark when it comes to finding emotional catharsis in these incredibly weird, borderline soul-crushing times.” Comfort with incessant change is tantamount to who the band are: it’s often the only constant.
Dutch Interior will play a record release show on Friday, March 6th at the Lodge Room in Los Angeles with support from North Americans.
It’s Glass EP Tracklist
1. Ground Scores
2. Go Fuck Yourself
3. Say Anything
4. Play the Song
5. I Have No Clue
Watch:
“Play the Song” Video
“Fourth Street” Video
“Sandcastle Molds” Video
