You may not immediately recognize Jason Balla’s voice when it’s not matching or weaving through the raspy alto of Emily Kempf, but the Dehd co-founder has been releasing solo material as Accessory for nearly as long as his main band has been around, with both projects materializing when his previous outfits Earring and NE-HI dried up. Following an early demo tape and some loose singles, today Balla is announcing Accessory’s proper debut album: the self-released Dust will land April 17, with the baroque-pop single “Calcium” serving as the record’s first taste.
In contrast with the upbeat jangle-pop of Dehd, the somber notes heard here are meant to mirror the increasingly grim news cycle of the past year or so. “This song is about living while the world burns,” Balla shares of the song, which was almost certainly written long before most of the stuff that’s currently dominating the news transpired. “I wrote it in a period of real hopelessness amidst all the suffering and hate that’s been the backdrop of the news lately. A lot of the song is just me trying to wrestle the events of the day into some kind of order, something to make sense of the debris.”
Balla also created a video for the song, which features by his estimate roughly 2,000 hand-painted frames of mostly black smudges rapidly ebbing and flowing. “Some of the ‘scenes’ are based on aerial photos of dust storms,” he shares. “I was drawn to these photos because their perspective reminded me of the album’s structure, starting zoomed out and then progressively getting more specific and intimate. A constant theme in my work is the collision between the organic and digital worlds so I was excited by the idea to scan these more raw and expressive paintings and give them artificial life with the computer.”
Check out the clip below, and pre-order Dust ahead of its April 17 release here.
