Dummy emerged in the middle of the pandemic, and while that mostly spelled doom for any newer artists trying to launch their careers during the worst period possible (although, the current stronghold-of-streaming-and-dead-journalism era has certainly posed its own uphill battles…,) it made what they were creating suited for a seachange moment to come. The Los Angeles noise-pop band’s two-fold of EPs released in 2020 set the tone burstings of a primitive, DIY-infused collage of soundscapes culled from kaleidoscopic patterns in dream-pop, post-punk, and new age — all naturally next steps for half the band, who once counted themselves as members of the Baltimore shoegaze band, Wildhoney.

In spite of those first cassettes’ psychedelic murk, it was clear that the Los Angeles band were well-versed in experimentation that held artistic substance in high regard. Then on 2021’s debut full-length, Mandatory Enjoyment, they added a jolt of electricity behind it all to reinvigorate indie rock during a time where beige, melodic guitar-pop milquetoast had oversaturated its landscape. Dummy’s sophomore follow-up, Free Energy, moves past any and all discourse happening elsewhere, though, and shifts focus onto their singular amorphous form of where their sound can move when approached outside the sphere of trend.

It asks of you to open your mind past their many influential touchstones (Stereolab, My Bloody Valentine, yada yada…) and let mutating layers of noise-pop and ambient waves guide your through an all-in-one-sitting sensory experience that a fool might call “record collection rock,” but anyone with good taste will acknowledge is an audacity to reinvent wheels already blurring in motion. The dissolve of linear timelines on Free Energy is most obvious where Dummy blend colorful, cranking archways of static with meditative orbs. It’s a push and a pull, an ebb and flow, and expansion and decompression of matter reacting accordingly by their sonic guide.

Unlike today’s vibe-as-aesthetic markings across indie’s dreamier pastures, its four members understand the power of bubbling pop into their own unshaped roads, offering up co-vocalists Emma Maatman and Nathan O’Dell as sage conduits for alien signals to be verbalized in the human language, as guitarist Joe Trainor criss-crosses any and all null spaces with cosmic electricity in immediate standouts “Soonish” and “Blue Dada”. At the core of this molecule is drummer Alex Ewell, overseeing particles kinetic through motorik sputters and a Baggy swagger that adds even more far-out space during the album’s instrumental recharges and transcendental levitations on “Psychic Battery” and “Godspin”.

To be able to create music that liberates sound and style as if it wants to abstract the space-time continuum is perhaps one of the few remaining tells of any artist that takes advantage of this freedom through art, and Dummy are inviting all of that energy into their universe.

Highlights: “Soonish”, “Unshaped Road”, “Blue Dada”

Dummy’s Free Energy will be released September 6th on Trouble In Mind Records.

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