Cloud Nothings Bounce Back from Burnout with The Shadow I Remember

After his last tour, Dylan Baldi of indie-rock stalwarts Cloud Nothings was wholly burnt out. Maybe it was the rigorous live schedule or the vigor of the excellent 2018 record Last Building Burning, but doing those songs night after night started to wear on Baldi. “Playing through the album every night would just drain me. It was hard to even do the old stuff after playing through that, ’cause I was just exhausted,” recalls Baldi over the phone. “The songs are almost too intense to be fun. They’re almost like an exercise in a way.” At one point, Baldi debated if touring was what he wanted to do for the rest of his life.

No more touring is a jarring thing to think about for Cloud Nothings, a group who have established themselves as the most reliable meat-and-potatoes rock group since Spoon. With the airtight work of drummer Jayson Gerycz, bassist TJ Duke and guitarist Chris Brown backing him up, Baldi has mastered a particular brand of sturdy, straightforward melodic punk, filled with harshness and tunefulness in equal degrees. On any song written by Baldi, his signature style cuts straight through.

While the tour for Last Building Burning felt like a drill to Baldi, he started getting his groove with an unexpected method: daily morning runs. “I would go out first thing in the morning, and that just became a pattern for me of running and then coming home and making a song,” explains Baldi. Soon enough, he had nearly 40 demos to sort through.

Those runs were the basis for The Shadow I Remember, one of the most consistent projects Cloud Nothings have ever put out. The new album is also a healthy middle ground between the heaviness of Last Building Burning and the comparative poppiness of 2017’s Life Without Sound. If you’ve liked Cloud Nothings in the past, you’ll surely find something to like on this record, from the pummeling drumwork of “It’s Love” to the soothing “Nara.”

Recorded last February over the course of a week, there’s a surprisingly relevant anxiety to The Shadow I Remember. For Baldi, who has made a career out of shouting angsty slogans, worried sentiments aren’t exactly unexpected. It’s just that the uncertainty is more stark than ever before. Take the opener, “Oslo,” where Baldi spends the chorus posing existential quandaries with the sense that singing them out loud will provide some clarity. “Some people can read it as depressive, but it seems realistic to me. I try to get that stuff out in the songs so I’m not talking about it too often in day-to-day life,” Baldi says with a laugh. “I get it out through these little one- or two-line lyrics here or there. That’s enough for me.”

Cloud Nothings have never been big fans of extended experimentation or long hours in the studio, but by reuniting with Steve Albini, the legendary producer behind their 2012 breakthrough record Attack On Memory, they made sure that the process would be as breakneck as possible. “It was just work from morning to night everyday. We’d work, then come back to our Airbnb, watch something terrible on Netflix for half an hour, and then everyone went to bed,” says Baldi. “It was a pretty exhausting process.” After a late final day which nearly kept Albini from making a flight to Japan, the album was done. Only a few weeks later, plans to release the album got put on hold as a pandemic swept the United States.