Enough With the Shoegaze Revival—Dummy Are Taking It Back to Madchester

In the late 1980s and early ’90s, two complementary visions for the future of rock music took shape on the British Isles. Each borrowed from the techniques and textures of the electronic dance music that was sweeping the UK in those heady Second Summer of Love days and used them to different ends. One sound is more popular than it’s ever been: shoegaze, which at its most adventurous involved using digital samplers to chop up and rearrange live drum parts and turn bursts of guitar feedback into expressions of incorporeal longing. The other isn’t quite so massively trendy, though it seems closer and closer to a full-on revival with every passing day. That is: baggy, or Madchester, or music that sounds like the Happy Mondays, or whatever you want to call it—bands that combined rave breakbeats and piano stabs with rock’n’roll songwriting and swagger, less concerned with incorporeal longing than they were with having a good time.

The L.A. indie rock band Dummy has always had a bit of shoegaze in its roaring guitar sound and coolly distanced vocals, though they’re too fidgety and curious to fit comfortably within that genre descriptor, no matter how broad it’s gotten lately. They also have a healthy dose of Stereolab, pinches of various krautrock bands, some Brian Eno, a little of the Velvet Underground, a touch of Terry Riley. One thing those reference points all have in common is their taste for drone and repetition; another is the impression they give, to varying degrees, of taking their music quite seriously, aspiring to something like the condition of high art. The Happy Mondays, on the other hand, were famous for getting extremely fucked up and offering reliable employment to the world’s least proficient maraca player. They and their laddish ilk are unexpected candidates for inclusion in Dummy’s canon of influences. And yet a solid half of the songs on Free Energy, Dummy’s fantastic second album, are propelled by the sort of herky-jerky dance rhythms that might have filled the floor at the Hacienda in its heyday. 

Even when they are mining Madchester fairly straightforwardly, they do it with such attention to craft that the results are much deeper than mere homage. In the opening stretch of “Soonish,” jet-powered rhythm guitar is backed by the sort of bubbly percussive synth sound that is one of Dummy’s signatures. Just as their interplay might begin to seem predictable instead of hypnotic, they cut the synth bubbles and replace them with sustained stretches of electric organ. The bass slightly shifts its position in the instrumental latticework; Emma Maatman’s vocals start to ascend; Nathan O’Dell soon joins her in call and response. Without ever interrupting their groove, or even so much as changing chords, they find an ecstatic new gear for the song, one that registers more bodily than consciously. 

Dummy’s previous catalog has moments that give a similar rush, but Free Energy’s newfound emphasis on rhythm seems to have unlocked something for them. They’re still meticulous tinkerers: Everyone in the band plays keyboard in addition to whatever else they do, and you can imagine all of them spending an hour or two just dialing in the right synth sounds before practice even starts, then running the same song five times in a row to locate the most impactful spot for one patch to recede and another to take over. And the raw materials—the electronics that pulsate just behind the beat across “Unshaped Road,” and the iridescent guitar feedback that eventually engulfs it; the spindly, Gang of Four-style riffing at the end of “Minus World”; the haywire organ solo on “Blue Dada”—are still rooted in the underground. But now, all of Dummy’s twiddling and arranging is pointed toward the sort of visceral release that’s more associated with pop and dance music than DIY psych-punk.

Free Energy’s purview extends far beyond baggy. This becomes clear with “Opaline Bubbletear,” an instrumental that could have been beamed in from some lost private-press new age album, with devotional peals of sax from the always-wonderful Cole Pulice. (This is as good a time as any to mention that a friend of mine, Jen Powers, contributes hammered dulcimer to the similarly meditative closer “Godspin,” which I did not realize until after I’d spent weeks listening to Free Energy and decided to write something about it. Hi Jen!) The album’s back half opens with a suite-like stretch of three songs—not quite seamless, with each one tumbling headfirst into the next—whose deepest trenches have more to do with ’70s German experimentalists like Klaus Schulze and Popol Vuh than any turn-of-the-’90s party-starters. The last of these three is called “Sudden Flutes !!!,” presumably an acknowledgement of Pulice’s reappearance playing aqueous woodwind synthesizer, but maybe also a nod to Yo La Tengo, another band that never bothered to decide whether they wanted to be indie-pop songsmiths or astronauts of the avant-garde.

Which, incidentally, is also pretty much true of the Happy Mondays. Whether through deliberate experimentation, stoned indifference, or some magical combination of the two, that band smuggled some magnificently weird music onto the British charts. The musical landscape of America in 2024 is very different from that of England in 1989, when it was possible for a band with an avowed interest in Captain Beefheart to become huge stars. Dummy may only ever conquer the Bandcamp charts, but there’s something admirable in the way Free Energy aims for such populist appeal without sacrificing the band’s freaky record-collector bona fides, especially because one gets the sense that they would be just as happy releasing an hour-long album of freeform synth jams. The devotion to song form, and the universal power of a great beat, seems borne of a conviction that challenging, adventurous music needn’t be some hermetic niche concern—that the stuff really matters, whether there are 15 people dancing or 15,000.