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Dutch Interior write songs that expand upon release. The Southern California six-piece (comprised of Conner Reeves, Hayden Barton, Shane Barton, Jack Nugent, Noah Kurtz, and Davis Stewart), most of whom have known each other since childhood, create music that can feel both outside of space and time yet deeply connected to it. 2025’s Fat Possum full-length debut Moneyball, made within the confines of their self-built Long Beach Studio, showcased the band’s knack for connecting the dots, conjoining aspects of ambient, slowcore, experimental folk, southern rock and more into something both cohesive and inquisitive. It’s music that has always considered the complexity of the world around them and the simple things that bind us together. New EP It’s Glass evolves these ideas in ways that sound both bigger and more intimate, with five tracks that fit together as much as they color outside the lines, like small universes that could not exist without each other.
It’s Glass was recorded at Hyde Street Studios in San Francisco, a renowned studio who has hosted the likes of Neil Young, the Grateful Dead, and Willie Nelson, over six days in May. Having access to a professional studio with a myriad of new gear allowed the band to forge ahead with a breadth of renewed ideas without losing any of their endearing homespun quality. Often spending up to eighteen hours a day in the studio, “the biggest restraint was working with and not against time.” Although having access to instruments like an organ and grand piano broadened the technical horizons of their sound, the constraints of working within one set place also meant they had to get creative with the tools at their disposal (“like using a screwdriver guitar part where it might have made sense to have strings.”). Often it 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 explain. A product of the intensified conditions where they were fleshed out, there’s a sense of magnitude laid bare within the deceptively simple compositions.
This amorphous quality of these “weird little songs” is often what makes Dutch Interior special: the tracks can feel like a lofty exhale or a fragile manifestation, hung in the delicate balance of a moody ambiance that gradually sinks into you. They often exist built on top of fragments of microscopic memory. A somber and elongated intro then transforms into more melodic phrasing and finger plucking by Kurtz in “Play the Song,” an arrangement that evolved through a multitude of revisions and was initially abandoned before reborn in the studio, grafted with new meaning and context. Repetition and the notion of being embedded in memory is key to the band’s process, something they reference as well in the shuddering instrumental of “Say Anything,” tearing apart the tissues of music to the point that it becomes both dissociative and reassuring. “It’s really inspiring to be consumed by music,” says Reeves, who wrote EP touchstone “I Have No Clue,” another track that meets somewhere in the middle between all of its prior (unreleased) iterations. “I wanted the landscape that the other songs have… all roads leading to the version that feels right.” Despite all the deliberate nuance of the EP, lead single “Ground Scores” stands out for its cautious optimism as a straightforward love song, revealing “how silly it is to be in love like this when the world is falling apart.” This comfort with incessant change is tantamount to who the band are: it’s often the only constant.
