Dutch Interior

A band is more than just a band.  With Dutch Interior, the story begins in Long Beach, California, but doesn’t stay there.  The collective project of long-term friends Jack Nugent,  Conner Reeves,  Shane Barton,  Hayden Barton,  Davis Stewart, and  Noah Kurtz, Dutch Interior began in relative insularity, in the living room of the Long Beach house three of the members were living.  Initially, they had simple goals: to write, finish, and mix a song all in one day on a tape recorder supplied by Reeves.  All of the members had been writing music individually, and the house provided a space to workshop and flesh out ideas (“throwing songs at the wall to see what stuck”).  The ambling, yet fully-formed collection of songs (with song titles that read like notes app proclamations) that ensued was called Kindergarten, a fitting title for a band that was taking its first footsteps.  When music seeps into your life, you’re almost unaware of it.

Dutch Interior recorded the full-length Blinded by Fame with a similarly loose, rudimental set of rules— songs that feel born of the moment: sonically cohesive due to the shared communal experience of making them.  Writing and recording out of a detached garage nearby, the collective small space allowed the tracks to grow their peculiar internal monologues into an experimental mixtape of homemade feeling.  While various band members contribute their own lyrics and vocals to singular tracks, everything is produced by Reeves, who “says no a lot and makes everything stick together.”  Live, the songs feature reworked arrangements and are suspended in a sense of constant evolution.  They applied this shapeshifting mentality to their Fat Possum debut “Ecig,” which underwent multiple interpolations before its final state.  Reeves’ vocals coalesce alongside a gradually unfurling, driving rhythm that teeters on the brink of collapse, and the band’s repressed tension explodes into dizzyingly new heights.  It’s music that expands past any self-contained space.

Nugent, who spent the time between Kindergarten and Blinded by Fame living out of his car traversing through middle America, talks about the band’s proclivity towards earnestness and highly-specific, lyrically driven songs, something he calls “necessary for the progression of music.”  There’s something stark and explicit about these flashes of a specific time that dig you into the now: “electronic marijuana cigarette / Arrested Development playing over and over again.”  It’s the self-seriousness of British brands like Black Country New Road spliced with the jubilant magnitude of Wilco’s Yankee Foxtrot Hotel, unafraid to get messy.  The latter’s Pitchfork review says as much: "myth, it has been said, is the buried part of every story”.  Hewn into different shapes, rewritten and rearranged, the music of Dutch Interior only contributes to its growing lore.

Call it the band’s own personal subculture: most of them have known each other since elementary school, still live together, and have a distinct conception of California, where they have spent pretty much their entire existence.  In some ways, living in a major city is just like living in a small town: everyone goes to the same bars with the same people, falls in and out of love, and tries to make ends meet, worried about the future.  “We’re setting a scene of our world in our songs,” the band explains, where it’s born out of the Long Beach house shows they grew up attending and playing in, or a more general geography that feels decidedly “American” in connotation.  For what is it to be American in 2024?  The burning wildfires, political unrest, depersonalization of the online, a choice to make art in a world that seems to reject that very premise.  What’s lowbrow is now cool, post and proto genre, and as Nugent suggests: “Americana in the sense of not recycling but making music that can be consumed widely.”  Herein lies the goal: to be truly consumed, by the ambition of being an artist, and making something that will stand the test of time.  It’s the only thing left fighting for.