Dutch Interior

Dutch Interior — the LA County-based band of lifelong friends Jack Nugent, Conner Reeves, Davis Stewart, Noah Kurtz, and brothers Shane and Hayden Barton — today announce their Fat Possum debut, Moneyball, out March 21st, and release its lead single “Fourth Street.”  Additionally, they announce a North American tour in support of their album.

Disparate influences converge on Moneyball, which shapeshifts and oscillates between alternative country, sharply hewn indie rock and hints of dissonant ambience, all while still sounding like a band who both speak their own private language and translate it into something universal. The ten songs are an expansion of the six-piece’s own history, a hyper-specific lore that can both recede and reappear into an endless loop of the landscape that surrounds them. All of Dutch Interior are internalized romantics, enraptured with fragmented moments that appear almost slapdash in their lyrics as well as the naive belief in human connection as the only way to save ourselves. 

When Dutch Interior started making music together, the bandmates (living between houses in Los Angeles and Long Beach) had been in and out of each other’s lives for the better part of two decades. Recorded over a six month period in the band’s self-made Long Beach studio, Moneyball was produced by Reeves and mixed by Phil Ek (Modest Mouse, Duster, Fleet Foxes). Five of the six band members have vocal and lyrical credits on the record; one can begin to pick up the separate stylings and personalities of the band members by the songs they independently write before bringing to the band at large, where the songs often grow into new forms all together. Despite this individual approach to songwriting, they describe each other as “branches of the same core life” whose colliding influences and experience all bleed into the songs, and the ten songs that make up the record find cohesion “not just in the art but the physical space”: the band’s studio as well as their longstanding friendships. 

Following the “muscular and capacious” (The FADER) “Ecig” and the “bleary, thoughtful, textured form of indie rock” (Stereogum) of “Sandcastle Molds,” “Fourth Street” is a frayed Americana track referencing where Dutch Interior’s first record was made, in the living room of a Fourth Street corridor apartment where three of the band members lived and three others still do.

In guitarist and vocalist Noah Kurtz’ words, “‘Fourth Street’ found its conception after a holiday trip visiting my parents. Starting off with a rambling recollection of feelings and personal anecdotes that come with living far away from loved ones, the song eventually builds to a chorus that’s about finding your footing on your own. Instrumentally, it was written with the intention of being a simple three-chord Americana rock song with a ratty, bubblegum chewing drum beat, whiny screaming lead guitar, and a cathartic a-rhythmic ending.”

Directed and edited by the band, the “Fourth Street” video captures the nostalgia of growing up by showing childhood videos of Kurtz on 2010-era computers. “We find ourselves looking back in desperation for something that’s gone and never really coming back,” the band says. “Through the eyes of the viewer it’s easy to watch the innocence of childhood decay as we desperately cling through the bias of our memories.”