It’s a bit like naming your band Illmatic, isn’t it? “Dummy” is a great word with lots of fun uses, but if you bring it up in a music-nerd context, people’s brains will all wander to the same lonely, desolate, beautiful Portishead album. The members of Dummy absolutely belong to the music-nerd community, and they know that better than most.
Dummy came together in Los Angeles in 2018. Half of the band used to be in Wildhoney, a great Baltimore dream-pop group. I once watched Wildhoney cover Sixpence None The Richer’s “Kiss Me” at a hardcore punk fest, an act of absolute bravery that demands respect. In forming Dummy, those folks wanted to move into unexplored territory, making music that moved in a more evocative and electronic direction. It didn’t sound anything like Portishead back then, and it still doesn’t. But Portishead almost immediately stopped sounding like Dummy, too. If you’re trying to make something free and unencumbered, you couldn’t ask for better role models.
Dummy’s 2021 debut album Mandatory Enjoyment found the band sounding like a very different critically beloved ’90s group, albeit one who existed in a lot of the same record collections as Portishead. The obvious comparison point for that record was Stereolab — another great role-model band to have. Dummy immersed themselves in infinite-repetition krautrock beats, lovingly recorded organ drones, and sweetly cascading vocal harmonies. Their sound combined Stereolab’s prim space-out sensibility with the whirling gooeyness of prime My Bloody Valentine, and that was enough to get them mentioned in conversations about the ascendant shoegaze revival. These days, that’s a good place for a young band to be. But Dummy had bigger things in mind, and they accomplish those things on Free Energy, a great leap of a sophomore album.
The title of Free Energy is not a reference to the fun neo-classic rock band that once recorded for DFA. Instead, Dummy’s members claim that the term comes from “bubble physics,” that it represents “thermodynamic potential,” as well as a more general sort of emotional positivity. Bubbles are all over Free Energy, from the ripple-bloop popping noises running through lead single “Nullspace” to the title of the echo-drenched sax-led instrumental interlude “Opaline Bubbletear.” The album cover is an image of a mid-pop bubble, and the lyrics are full of physics jargon that I’m too dumb to understand.
But you don’t have to be a physicist to understand the sense of momentum that Dummy generate on Free Energy. There’s still a decent bit of Stereolab in the mix on the new album, and it coexists with influence from some of the early-’90s shoegaze and dream-pop bands who experimented with way-out dance music — Curve, Medicine, Seefeel. You can tell that the members of Dummy have deep record collections, but there’s a lot more to the record than its influences. Free Energy is made with a wide-open sense of possibility. You don’t have to think while you’re listening to Free Energy, and it might be better if you don’t. It’s a record made to feel, whether that means dancing or getting all shroomed out and staring at the sunset.
When you’re listening to Free Energy, you often have no idea what you’re hearing. The album was apparently mostly made with guitars, but those guitars have been blurred and warped so artfully that you can get lost in the carefully distended noises. The drums, on the other hand, haven’t been blurred at all. You can feel those things in your chest. On Free Energy, Dummy dig way deeper into dance music, and its hammering breakbeats and deep, thrumming basslines make for a warm and welcoming environment. So many of Dummy’s neo-shoegaze peers tie themselves to a particular guitar tone. Dummy are great at layering their sounds, but they’re even better at making sure those sounds move. The music on Dummy is a woozy, mutated version of pop, but it’s still pop at heart.
The pacing is beautiful. Dummy know how to assemble an album, and Free Energy unfolds with a sure-handed internal logic. There’s the near-wordless tone-setting intro that crashes hard into the joyously explosive beats-and-vrooms hookfest “Soonish,” maybe the catchiest song that this band has recorded yet. From there, things get more contemplative, alternating between smeary mood-pieces and fizzy jangle-pop jams. In a track like “Blue Dada,” you can hear all the sides of this band working together in concert. It’s messy and propulsive and pretty and disorienting, and it pounds you with sheets of sound that leave you dizzy and breathless.
Dummy don’t keep their collective foot mashed on the gas pedal all through Free Energy. Later in the album, they slow down enough to show off all that they can do with echo and with layered voices. Emma Maatman, one of the band’s two singers, has this incredible tone that can radiate playfulness and loneliness at the same time, and the group has big ideas about uses of organ sustain and sculpted feedback. But even at their most expansive, Dummy never lose their grip on songcraft and dynamics. The tracks never get too long or indulgent, and whenever they go into the trippy zone, you always know that there’s another explosion of energy around the corner.
Lots of parts of Free Energy might remind you of some other band or record, but the end result is a gorgeous collection of sounds and ideas and emotions, one that’s as deeply felt as it is intricately plotted. I don’t hear quotation marks when I listen to Free Energy. Instead, I hear a band in love with its own potential. On Free Energy, Dummy don’t sound a damn thing like Portishead’s Dummy, and that’s a good thing. Instead of emulating their namesake — or, for that matter, emulating anyone else — they earn their name.
Free Energy is out 9/6 on Trouble In Mind.
Other albums of note out this week:
• MJ Lenderman’s Manning Fireworks
• Fred again..’s Ten Days
• Peel Dream Magazine’s Rose Main Reading Room
• Midwife’s No Depression In Heaven
• Public Opinion’s Painted On Smile
• Mercury Rev’s Born Horses
• The The’s Entitled Ensoulment
• Toro y Moi’s Hole Erth
• Knitting’s Some Kind Of Heaven
• Bleachers’ A Stranger Desired
• LL Cool J’s The Force
• David Gilmour’s Luck And Strange
• Prim’s Move Too Slow
• Max Richter’s In A Landscape
• SUUNS’ The Breaks
• The Crane Wives’ Beyond Beyond Beyond
• The Dare’s What’s Wrong With New York?
• Molchat Doma’s Belaya Polosa
• The Heavy Heavy’s One Of A Kind
• The Deslondes’ Roll It Out
• Mo Kenney’s From Nowhere
• HONNE’s OUCH
• Sarah Kinsley’s Escaper
• Wayne Graham’s Bastion
• BASIC’s BASIC
• Party Dozen’s Crime In Australia
• Ashe’s Willson
• Bremer/McCoy’s Kosmos
• Fat Dog’s Woof.
• Callahan & Witscher’s Think Differently
• Caleb Hearn’s Left On McKinney
• La Doña’s Los Altos de la Soledad
• Claude Fountaine’s La Mer
• Tall Juan’s Raccoon Nights
• Cathedral Ceilings’ La La La…Whatever!
• YAI’s Sky Time
• Masayoshi Fujita’s Migratory
• Monolake’s Studio
• Rachel Platten’s I Am Rachel Platten
• Skullpresser’s Positions Of Power
• Denitia’s Sunset Drive
• Nala Sinephro’s Endlessness
• Silver Scrolls’ Mind Lines
• Whisper States’ Whisper States
• Tamar Berk’s Good Times For A Change
• Arrested Youth’s Too Late To Start Over
• Elephant Tree’s Handful Of Ten
• Ant’s Collection of Sounds: Volume 1
• Shovels & Rope’s Something Is Working Up Above My Head
• CRIIBABY’s when i’m alone i feel weightless
• Nicky Jam’s INSOMNIO
• Many Eyes’ The Light Age
• Lollise’s I hit the water
• Sonny Singh’s Sage Warrior
• Okay Kaya’s Oh My God – That’s So Me
• Man’s Gin’s The Reprobate
• Massive Nightmares’ Massive Nightmares
• TRAFFIK’s The Signs
• Styrofoam’s The Lost Album
• Webb Chapel’s World Cup
• Arsenal Mikebe’s Drum Machine
• Cheridomingo’s Shapeshift
• Paris Hilton’s Infinite Icon
• The Airborne Toxic Event’s Hollywood Park
• Rex Orange County’s The Alexander Technique
• Blink-182’s One More Time… Part 2
• The pop-punk Disney-tribute compilation A Whole New Sound
• RAYE’s Live At Montreux Jazz Festival 2024
• Dave Harrington, Max Jaffe, & Patrick Shiroishi’s Zebulon! live album
• Hayden Pedigo’s Live In Amarillo, Texas live album
• Tori Amos’ Unrepentant Geraldines 10th Anniversary Deluxe Edition
• The Faces’ Complete BBC Concert & Session Recordings 1970-1973 box set
• The Cardigans’ The Rest Of The Best Volume 1 & 2
• 10,000 Maniacs’ MTV Unplugged (Expanded Edition)
• Martina Topley-Bird’s Quixotic (Deluxe Reissue)
• Camila Cabello’s C,XOXO: Magic City Edition
• Man Or Astro-Man?’s ROYGBIV (Recordings From The BBC)
• Tom Vek’s Luck 10th Anniversary Edition
• Vance Joy’s dream your life away’ (10th Anniversary Edition)
• Susumu Yokota’s Acid Mt. Fuji 30th Anniversary Deluxe Reissue
• Laura Jane Grace & The Mississippi Medicals’ Give An Inch EP
• Fcukers’ Baggy$$ EP
• Ibibio Sound Machine’s The Black Notes EP
• Killing Of A Sacred Deer’s Killing Of A Sacred Deer EP
• Decimal Decade’s Soon To Evolve EP
• Monica Aben’s Everything I’ve Ever Known EP
• Scout Gillett’s Imagination, MO EP
• Georgia Gets By’s Split Lip EP
• SHEIVA’s Heech EPRINI’s Lucky 7 EP
