Feature, News, Reviews

Dummy Share New Single “Final Weapon” – Taken From Forthcoming New Album “Mandatory Enjoyment” out 22nd October via Trouble In Mind Records

September 7, 2021
Press shot, credit Dummy

Dummy

Share new single, Final Weapon

New album, Mandatory Enjoyment out 22nd October
on Trouble in Mind

Los Angeles band Dummy refuses to slow down. After releasing two cassette EP’s in 2020 (on Popwig and Born Yesterday respectively), Dummy’s debut full-length album arrives via Chicago’s Trouble in Mind Records.

Employing pummeling guitars and celestial ambience within the same breath, the band folds a myriad of reference points into their drone-pop style. Influence from ’60s melodicism and ’90s UK noise pop can be found woven in with inspiration from spiritual jazz, Japanese new age, and Italian minimalism.

Listen to their new single “Final Weapon” streaming below:

Dummy creates these deep and immersive ensembles filled with a plethora of addictive tones and creative passages. “Final Weapon” engulfs the audience immediately with the instiable percussive elements and the genius formation of the expressive composition. Dummy contributes layer upon layer into the atmosphere, this vast world is filled with experimental elements, futuristic tones, and at its core this vintage, vibrant warmth.

Dummy delivers intoxicating arrangements with a fearless commitment to their impressive energy develops this innovative aura with melancholic motions and upbeat cadence. At only 3 minutes 9 seconds, the journey that the outfit and audience embark on is simply hypnotic, as you are pulled into the alluring rhythms and take in the tantalizing notes, when the arrangement ends you find yourself desperate to embrace this ensemble once more.

Dummy delivers intoxicating arrangements with a fearless commitment to their impressive energy.

The band’s Emma Maatman says of the track, ““Final Weapon” weaves a lot of disparities together. It’s got a frantic beat but a laid back, dreamy vocal delivery. It’s a fairly poppy and upbeat track, but the lyrical themes are rather serious: nuclear weapons testing and military experimentation. The video relates more to the overall feeling of the song – on an initial surface level everything is bright, colorful fun, but pretty soon things frantically devolve in front of your eyes, and more disturbing images start to appear.

“On a very basic level, the idea for the “Final Weapon” video was a take on “squish” videos, or any of the “satisfying” viral videos that pop up in your various social media feeds. I’ve always found something inherently unnerving about those. We were hoping it would make for a fun video to watch, I knew for sure it would be a fun video to make, and most importantly I thought it would capture the feeling the song gives me – like a psychedelic Dadaist birthday party spinning out of control.”

Dummy dodges the brooding, dark, dramatic tropes of contemporary “artistic” music often found in punk, experimental, and electronic, instead insisting on joyous and euphoric sonic palettes. They refuse to be artistically stagnant, continuously shifting their approach to writing across 12 tracks.

Shaped by performances around Los Angeles in 2019, songs like “Daffodils” and “Fissured Ceramics” feature relentless driving energy and ample psychedelic noise. Elsewhere, Dummy counterbalances the aggression with meditative synthscapes focused on sound design and studio experimentation, like on the motorik “X-Static Blanket”. Finally, centerpiece “H.V.A.C.” and the album’s final track, “Atonal Poem”, seek to synthesize these two poles, offering multi-part journeys through uncharted sonic territory.

In contrast to blissed-out instrumentation, Dummy’s sardonic lyricism examines “the burden of modern life, consumerism, environmental collapse, alienation, and other anxieties born out of living in this absurd moment in history”. Interior design, marine pollution, the psychology of commercial architecture, and nuclear testing are all featured subjects. Dummy’s restless creativity keeps them moving ever-forward, continuously challenging themselves and pushing their sound into exciting and exhilarating places. This is – as the album title suggests – “Mandatory Enjoyment”.

RIYL: Silver Apples, Laraaji, Velvet Underground, Stereolab, Cluster, Antena, My Bloody Valentine, Haruomi Hosono, Carl Sagan, Yo La Tengo, Finis Africae, Midori Takada

Recorded at Home by Dummy & at Studio 22 by Joo-joo Ashworth (Automatic, Gum Country, Froth)

Tracklisting:

01 / Protostar
02 / Fissured Ceramics
03 / Final Weapon
04 / Punk Product #4
05 / Cloud Pleaser
06 / H.V.A.C.
07 / Tapestry Distortion
08 / Unremarkable Wilderness
09 / Daffodils
10 / X-Static Blanket
11 / Aluminum In Retrograde
12 / Atonal Poem

Preorder:
https://notdummy.bandcamp.com/album/mandatory-enjoyment

https://www.instagram.com/notdummy/

https://notdummy.bandcamp.com/

You Might Also Like

No Comments

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.