Dutch Interior: The Best of What's Next

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When I’m spending time with my pals, often I’ll see them do something that makes me think contentedly, that’s what friendship looks like. It could be a thoughtful gesture, like giving someone a bouquet of tulips just because, or a silly exchange, so hyper-specific and ridiculous that only this small group of people would appreciate it. But what about the sound of friendship, beyond burbling laughter, soft words of comfort or hushed conversations late at night? LA County six-piece Dutch Interior know the sound of their friendship, because it’s at the very heart of their warm, idiosyncratic, woozy music. Brothers Shane (keys, vocals) and Hayden Barton (drums), Noah Kurtz (guitar, vocals), Jack Nugent (guitar, vocals), Conner Reeves (guitar, vocals) and Davis Stewart (bass, vocals) have been playing together for years by now, albeit in a series of different bands.

When I chat with half of the band over Zoom—Shane, Noah and Jack, all kindly joining the call at 7 AM to accommodate my time difference—Noah tells me, “If you look at the lineup of our six members, and you throw a rock in that direction and it hits two people, those two people probably had a band together at some point.” Shane and Hayden have, naturally, always been a part of each others’ lives, and Davis has known them since he was a baby, because his older brother is a friend of Shane’s. The rest have been in one others’ orbit since high school at least. Noah recalls meeting Conner in fourth grade: “We sort of met in a music class, and he taught me how to play Led Zeppelin and I taught him how to play a different Led Zeppelin song.”

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I’m only meeting some of the Dutch Interior members on this call, but their easygoing patter—mixed with their cerebral yet unpretentious approach to their art—quickly endears them to me. Jack’s an English nerd; he uses words like “isolato” casually in our conversation, but he’s so laidback and cool that it doesn’t feel affected—just true to his literary leanings. He was pursuing a graduate degree in 20th Century American literature until the band started to get enough traction that he dropped out of the program. Shane has an odd side hustle creating hoax TikToks, most of them centered around Disneyland—like animatronics supposedly malfunctioning or a disgruntled Jungle Cruise tour guide whose narration gets progressively more bleak. “Yeah, that’s one of my darkest… it’s not a secret, clearly, but it is a source of embarrassment for me, but it’s lucrative, so I’m not going to stop,” he says sheepishly. Noah tells me that he’s “really into [his] kitchen these days”; he’s the type of person who loves to make simple dishes impeccably. “I do, like, chicken and rice, but I’ll spend hours trying to perfect it,” he tells me.

The history of Dutch Interior can largely be told through the various places where the band have hung out, and the studios (yes, plural) they’ve made over the years. For a while, the nexus of their hangouts was the Barton family’s place. “The property is broken up into four tiny homes, which is conducive to teens having their own space,” Shane tells me. It wasn’t until Jack, Davis and Noah moved into their Long Beach apartment on the Fourth Street Corridor that the first Dutch Interior record was made. Even then, that album, 2021’s Kindergarten, was more a fun group project than a conscious debut. “Conner had a tape machine and he brought it over. We were all bored and would just get drunk and record songs,” Jack says, later adding, “We released it on Spotify, just for fun, for friends… Kindergarten wasn’t like an effort to record a proper album. That album just kind of fell out of us.”

Next was the detached garage in Shane’s Long Beach backyard—just a couple blocks from the Fourth Street apartment—where they recorded their second album, Blinded by Fame (2023). Dutch Interior came together there in summer of 2022, and Jack emphasizes that there were “no expectations—We were like, ‘We’re gonna release [Blinded by Fame] and play some shows, and we’re a band again. I can’t believe we’re doing this again, holy shit, after everything fell apart with [COVID].’” That record is rife with shimmering keys, twangy guitars and a lackadaisical sense of off-kilter whimsy that is distinctly Dutch. The setting can be distinctly heard on “Oscar, Please?,” which was recorded when they hot miked the backyard. “A plane flew over at the right time and made this huge bass-y crescendo underneath all of it,” Jack says. Their now-manager Dan heard Blinded by Fame and was won over, and with him on board, the guys felt even more spurred on to make the band happen.

Part of their sonic evolution was finding the right studio space that would meet Dutch Interior where they were at and push their musical boundaries without breaking them. “We didn’t really know how to move the sound forward—which has always been a very big priority for us—without making big jumps in sound, but having a nice progression and keeping our ethic very strong. So the natural solution was to build a studio,” Jack says. Hayden scouted out a location about 15 minutes from the Fourth Street apartment—still a hub of the band, since Jack, Hayden and Conner all live there—a room in a warehouse that Jack half-jokingly dubs “a classic fire hazard horror story type place.” They poured their funds into soundproofing the space in summer of 2023, working through the blazing heat with no ventilation or AC. “It was just like inhaling insulation and drywall and wood shavings in like, a 100 degree room for two months on end,” he says.

The effort was worth it—Dutch Interior had a space to call their own, and the album they crafted there, Moneyball, is their best yet. Produced by Conner, their “Don of the Studio” (in Jack’s words), the record is out via Fat Possom on March 21. Today they’ve released the closing track on the album, “Beekeeping.” Over a rush of distorted, atmospheric background noise, woozy keys saunter in and Shane croons about romantic shortcomings. When his voice reaches a particularly sweet, melancholic peak, it reminds me distinctly of the late Stephen Fitzpatrick from Her’s.

“Beekeeping” is one of two Shane-written tracks on the album, the other being the unexpected love song “Science Fiction.” Our colloquial language around love often leans into the fantastic, but as a big fan of sci-fi—as we speak, Shane is wearing a The Thing T-shirt, and his TikTok bio says “I like science fiction and playing pretend”—he wanted to look at romance through that lens instead. “I liked the idea of writing a love song that had the amazement of science fiction, but it’s still grounded in reality,” Shane explains. Cello, violin and viola creep in on “Science Fiction,” unsettling the listener until Shane shares his soft, sincere words. “I’m a ray gun / Overheating in your palm,” he sings over an acoustic guitar that feels all the more sweet and earnest when contrasted with the disquieting strings. It evolved a lot from an originally very guitar-driven demo, in the style of their earlier band Skin Mag. Conner urged Shane to take it to a stranger place, leaning into the dissonance of the background strings by singing the wrong note at the end of one of the verses. “That song changed a lot in a really cool way,” Shane recalls.

Everyone in the band writes and sings—and though Hayden doesn’t have any songwriting or vocal credits on Moneyball, the guys say it’s just a matter of time until they release a Hayden song (“He’s really into big band music, and I think that his style of crooner music is definitely going to bleed in at some point,” Jack shares, and Shane gushes: “He’s constantly writing. He’s a better pianist than I am”). There’s an astounding lack of ego when it comes to Dutch Interior, but that dedication to the communal process instead of one’s own particular vision is what makes an album from a band of half-a-dozen songwriters not just work, but sound really fucking good. “We bring songs in, and when they’re released to the band, it’s no longer your baby. It’s the band’s—we’re all of us putting our heads together with Conner as the sole producer. He’s kind of the last yes or no on things—it’s not strict, but he’s the one behind the computer, and he’s the one with the ear for miking things and making things sound the way they do. So you’re surrendering your song to Dutch as the filter,” Jack explains.

And even though they have the studio to themselves (shared with their friend Levi, who’s a studio drummer), the group are strict about their timelines. Sometimes they’ll send demos to each other beforehand, but most of the work happens in the studio without overthinking things. “We’ll just start tracking that day and sort of realize that song in real time with the band. So usually we’ll finish a song in, like, a day or two,” Noah explains. The constrained timeline is a boon to their creativity, in Shane’s eyes: “It leads to a lot of just cool discoveries and happy accidents. I think it gives a lot of the songs the raw or imperfect feel that we like so much. That’s part of it for us, for sure.”

One such happy accident was the strange instrument that Conner MacGyvered for “Sandcastle Molds”—a Jack song about how “things are built from sand and how we all think that all this is very stable and permanent, but it could fall out from under us at any moment.” He reflects, “I’m glad that song’s coming out now, because that shit is really happening.” The rattling percussion and honky tonk, MJ Lenderman-esque melody is augmented by a harmonica that’s played into a “‘60s Turner mic that has a quarter inch input into a guitar auto harmonizer pedal,” according to Jack, who explains that Conner “played it and, like, the harmonica being naturally tone-bendy, [it] kind of freaked the pedal out, and it made this crazy, scary drone noise.”

From the strained desperation of Davis’ track “Life (So Crazy)” to Conner’s happy-go-lucky country song “Horse,” Dutch Interior hit the mark when it comes to finding emotional catharsis in these incredibly weird, borderline soul-crushing times. “I think the band is this sort of shining light in a lot of our lives,” Noah tells me when I ask how they keep hope alive these days. “We’re doing something that we all love, and doing it together.” And I know Jack’s joking when he says this, but it feels more and more apt as time passes: “If Moneyball can be a soundtrack for American degradation, let’s go.”

Clare Martin is a cemetery enthusiast and Paste’s associate music editor.

Dutch Interior: The Best of What’s Next

Watch the music video for the band's new song "Beekeeping" below.