Dylan Baldi is never not working. As he stands on the cusp of releasing his fifth album in seven years with Cloud Nothings, he’s already thinking about the next.
“I’m playing with some stuff for a kind of solo record, an acoustic thing,” he says. “And then I do some weird free jazz type stuff here in Cleveland with some friends. I never fully finish anything unless there’s some kind of clear deadline, however tight that deadline may be.”
The eight days that Cloud Nothings gave themselves for recording ‘Last Building Burning’ is unsurprisingly brief when you hear the album. Eight fast and furious songs long, it marks a return to the traditional band formula that sees them practice intensely for a month, with Dylan only writing his lyrics once in the studio. It requires the sort of focus that would send most sane people over the edge, but for him, it’s the only way to capture the energy that defines the band.
“For the record before this one [2017’s ‘Life Without Sound’], we took three years between records and didn’t even tour a whole lot in that time. I was all over the place so I think when we got back to make a record, I’d actually kind of forgotten how we did things,” he explains.
“I’d lost familiarity with the parts of ourselves that I liked the most on the last record and I wanted to get that back. It’s a much more insane way of working because it makes you feel crazy, but I always feel better with the results.”
