Daily Dose is your daily source for the song you absolutely, positively need to hear every day. Curated by the Paste Music Team.
The Dodos—the band, not the bird—are back from the brink of extinction with “Forum,” the lead single from their first new album in three years.
The Bay Area duo, made up of Logan Kroeber and Meric Long, formed in 2005. Within a few years, their second album Visiter was hailed for its primitivist sound and experimental instrumentation. Kroeber studied West African Ewe drumming and blues fingerpicking, and his hyper-precise percussive contributions share center stage with Long’s guitar-playing and heavy metal-inspired vocals on the album.
Since then, The Dodos have expanded from their minimalist roots over the course of six albums, occasionally enlisting the help of outside musicians and swapping electric guitars for their usual acoustic ones to continue to experiment with their sound. Their latest single, titled “Forum,” shifts between expansive and metronomic to reflect that growth.
“Forum” combines musical elements familiar to the work of The Dodos—intricate looping drum patterns, clattering, manic guitars, whiplash-inducing time changes—with new instrumentation, like the song’s shimmering string section present underneath. The track will be included on the band’s new album Certainty Waves, and considering that the album’s cover art depicts an unsettled ocean, it’s hardly a stretch to link the ebbing speed and tension present in “Forum” to that elemental imagery.
Certainty Waves is due out from Polyvinyl on Oct. 12 and is available for preorder here. Hear “Forum” below, and be sure to keep scrolling to check out the new album’s artwork and tracklist, and the band’s upcoming North American tour. Finally, since you’re here, watch a clip from the Paste vault of The Dodos performing “Jodi,” circa 2008.
