Dutch Interior — the LA County-based band of lifelong friends Jack Nugent, Conner Reeves, Davis Stewart, Noah Kurtz, and brothers Shane and Hayden Barton — “specialize in a bleary, thoughtful, textured form of indie rock” (Stereogum).
Today, the sextet release a new single/video, “Play the Song.” “Play the Song” is the band’s first new music since this year’s acclaimed Moneyball (Fat Possum), which Pitchfork cited as Dutch Interior’s “most wide-ranging, thoughtfully realized album, leaving the band’s own pins all across the map of the American songwriting tradition.”
Recorded at Hyde Street Studios in San Francisco, “Play the Song” feels simultaneously like a lofty exhale and a fragile manifestation. The song was born out of the band’s fascination with repetition, memory, and the idea that a fragment of a song played in a specific moment of time can change your experience of it. Songwriter Noah Kurtz’s knack for affected melody runs counterpart to the track’s more off-kilter impressionism.
Commenting on the song, Kurtz says: “I wrote it as sort of an homage to those songs that come around every once in a while and grab you in a very specific but unexplainable way. Maybe it’s an unhealthy attachment or indulgence but you just have to put that shit on repeat until you can’t anymore.”