Cloud Nothings Couldn't Tour. They Released 27 Live Albums Instead

By Danielle Chelosky


Dylan Baldi has a lot of ground to cover. The leader of prolific Ohio indie metal band Cloud Nothings would be talking about July 2020’s quarantine album The Black Hole Understands; December’s follow-up Life Is Only One Event; one of their 27 live albums all unleashed last year; their seven Bandcamp exclusive EPs released from August 2020 up until now; or this month’s new LP, The Shadow I Remember, which drops on February 26.


Or he may would be discussing his noseless dog, Lavender, who he adopted with his girlfriend, Sadie Dupuis of Speedy Ortiz, around Christmastime. “She’s an one-of-a-kind dog,” Baldi tells MTV News. “People will just stop and be like, ‘Look at this dog,’ and aspire to be with this dog in a way like no other dog I’ve seen,” he says. “It’s like having a rare Pokemon.”


While in Baldi’s lockdown, Lavender has often graced the official Cloud Nothings Twitter account with stealth cameos. And without touring, that social-media presence is one of the few mobile pieces of the band: “Right right now [Cloud Nothings] just feels like it’s a Twitter account that I post dumb stuff to every once in a while,” he jokes. Within the past decade, the project has evolved into a full musical group right after starting as Baldi’s outlet for songwriting in 2009. These days, once they are more than just an internet persona, Cloud Nothings consists of Baldi on vocals and guitar, TJ Duke on bass and backing vocals, Jayson Gerycz on drums, and Chris Brown on guitar, keyboards, and backing vocals.


“It doesn’t feel like a functioning musical group at the moment. However while in [quarantine], we’ve still been able to get stuff done. It just feels like a key, vital segment of it — the live show is, I think, how a lot of people come to know us and like us — is missing, and that’s sad.”


Just by listening to the music, you could tell Cloud Nothings are meant to be heard live. The songs have only gotten more complex and packed with moving parts as their career has progressed, from Attack on Memory’s iconic 10-minute noise crunch “Wasted Days” to the breezy, early The Shadow I Remember single “The Spirit Of.” There really is routinely an intentional culmination at work underneath the loud surface. Patience is required, yet it’s rewarded. This is all revealed while in shows once the members trail off into explosive jam sessions and fans fling their bodies around in violent ecstasy.


And while it’s peculiar for fans not have the ability to attend shows, it’s even more disorienting for musicians to lose the freedom to tour and travel. “My brain and body had received pretty used to being somewhere different relatively constantly,” he says. “It’s a very common thing for me to do, so it’s weird for me to strip that away entirely.” One of the band’s first quarantine ideas was to drop a ton of live records — nearly 30 — of performances all over the globe, from New York to Brussels to Paris. Not several bands can do this while sustaining the integrity of each release; Cloud Nothings, who use shows as a possibility to experiment every night, can. Without touring, though, they’ve had to prepare alternate arrangements for building a living.


“Even doing as much as we did, our guitarists paints houses,” Baldi explains. He and Duke have been temporarily working as tech guys for court depositions over Zoom. They’ve also customary themselves through the Bandcamp’s subscription service. For $5 a month, a Cloud Nothings subscriber gets two exclusive albums each year and a EP each month, and also 20 percent off merch. “Just by creating all of this stuff, it keeps a dialogue going, at least between us and fans of the band,” he says. “The records, I sort of beat myself up about really attempting to prepare good. This stuff feels low-stakes, nevertheless it’s for the true heads.”


Relatedly, in December, one of Baldi’s tweets gained traction and afterward caused controversy: “your spotify wrapped is almost just A list of artists you owe cash to lol.” While Baldi dismisses most of his updates as “shitposts,” he admits there should be a conversation about the offer problem of streaming services. “If you use Spotify, you can use a different service, or you can do something else. You can! Why don’t you, actually?” He says. “But at the same time, of course Spotify is an evil organization that is to blame for these things. The way they pay artists is cruel and unusual.” The discourse over this tweet centered on exactly this tension. How fair is it to blame consumers any time the root of the problem is an agency? Do consumers have to be contained responsible for contributing to what they know is harmful?


Even in the face of this, Baldi is still inspired and optimistic. “You gotta just find the people and things that are doing interesting stuff,” he says, “even inside the confines of an industry that doesn’t habitually bring that to the forefront.” His attitude is that you could get burned out doing anything, that it’s inevitable — and that you could either quit or work through it. Has he imagined quitting? “Yeah, however then, like, what would I do, you know?” He quips.


And so he is promoting The Shadow I Remember, which is old to him at this point. The 11 songs were recorded in Chicago with legendary noise maestro and trusted collaborator Steve Albini, who previously, and notoriously, played Scrabble once working on Attack on Memory. (He played Scrabble again this time, nevertheless Baldi understands: “When I take a break, I look at my phone, scroll through photographs of dogs on Instagram. It’s the same thing,” he says.). It perpetuates the fundamental Cloud Nothings philosophy, which Baldi sums up in the press release as his objective of making “a three-minute song to be an epic.” “They can have all these different parts and moving things going on so that nothing ever gets dull yet it makes sense in a way so it doesn’t just sound like chaos,” he explains. “There would be a different melody, every instrument’s playing something different, yet it all sounds like one cohesive thing.”


In both their music and in a unprecedented time of global uncertainty, Cloud Nothings approach the edge of chaos while still managing to keep it tidy and organized. It’s what Baldi has been refining since the starting. It culminates in their latest 33-minute album and in the simple act of creating and and doing whichever you could — because there really is nothing else to do.