Dummy Drop Third Album, Say Indie Rock Has Lost Its Meaning

Los Angeles experimental band Dummy have released their third album, Do You Love the Color of the Sky?, and used a new Far Out Magazine interview to lay out why they consider it an "anti-zeitgeist" record. The band — Alex Ewell, Emma Maatman, Nathan O'Dell, Joe Trainor, and Lance Umble — have long run a blunt line on their Bandcamp bio: "music making shouldn't be fun."

"We've always been making pop music"

From the krautrock textures of their earlier work to the trip-hop shadings of their second album, Free Energy, Trainor says the throughline has always been pop — just not in the way people assume. "We've always kind of said we're making pop music, but it's more about the sensibility of pop music, not the aesthetics of it," he told Far Out.

That pop sensibility has nothing to do with the charts. The album's press materials describe it as aiming to build "a new radical political vision," leaning into something highly personal and inward-looking. Trainor says the band has never chased trends and won't bend its sound to fit what's popular. The closing track and lead single, "N of 1," is what Trainor calls "the remix of a pop song you'll never hear" — built around a single beat, driven by drum machine and hi-hat, and, by his account, clearly built for the dancefloor.

Leaving indie rock behind for electronic textures

That's a long way from the jagged, guitar-heavy sound of 2021's Mandatory Enjoyment. Trainor doesn't mince words about the genre itself: "Indie rock doesn't really mean anything anymore, kind of like shoegaze." He argues that current indie rock is actually circling back toward punk — the genre's origins, after all, lie with punk musicians who no longer wanted to make punk, and younger bands now are pulling that thread back.

Trainor adds that Dummy's music still carries indie rock elements, just "with a lot less referentiality." The turn toward electronic sounds has felt like a loosening for the band. As Ewell puts it: "Electronic music gave us permission to break rules we used to hold onto," opening the door to making whatever sounds they want.

The full interview was published by Far Out Magazine.