Cloud Nothings
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Cloud Nothings

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“I’m watching my friends carve pumpkins,” he says, it being Halloween. “It’s kinda cool, I guess.” Baldi released the band’s eponymous self-titled sophomore record in early 2011. Attack On Memory was released just one year later, nearly to the day. Scrappy and full of angst, Attack On Memory could be perceived as a response to critics who felt his sound was too derisive and poppy. Baldi has noted that he even considered changing the band’s name, as part of a greater evolution.

Still, he’s not ready to concede that he overthought the process. Attack On Memory may have a dark, almost realist edge to it, though Baldi won’t admit much.

“I think if the new songs got heavy, they were still very detached from the lyrics. The songs may be a little heavier than anything we’d done before, and perhaps inadvertently the lyrics got a little darker along the way. I mean, there’s a few songs on the record that aren’t the heaviest things in the world.”

Attack On Memory is the third full-length from Cloud Nothings, but after the exposure their self-titled second brought, it’s easy to imagine Baldi being confounded by the dreaded “sophomore slump.” Many bands look to experienced producers for guidance. But of course, Baldi refutes this notion.

“I had the songs and I played them the way I wanted them to sound,” he says of working with famed “hands off” producer Steve Albini. “He didn’t really direct me and say, ‘This is the way this song should sound,’ or anything like that. That’d be really weird to hear from him.” It didn’t take long for Baldi to finish work on the record before he took it on the road. Tours throughout North America, Europe and Japan kept Baldi busy throughout 2012. And as he attests, these tours allowed him to grow more comfortable with his new material.

“I kind of like [the songs] more, now that I’ve toured them,” he says. “I’m usually not very confident about anything right before I release it. I’m excited to have the opportunity to play the songs more and more, because I feel better about them.”

So does Baldi find himself keeping his new songs at a distance when he begins a tour? Well, not exactly. “It’s easy to get emotionally involved in them because they’re my songs and they’re about things that I’m thinking. Sometimes it takes me awhile to totally figure a song out.”

While having the opportunity to tour places that many young bands would only dream of playing isn’t lost on Baldi, he’s not ready to give into the idea that locales as varied as Luxemborg and Osaka have totally influenced his writing.

“Seeing new things and meeting new people, that’s always a great experience. It may not necessarily influence my writing, but it does influence me as a person. It’s always flattering to have people who don’t speak the same language as you come to the shows.”

Cloud Nothings won’t have to worry much about the language barrier for their inaugural trip to Australia. And though Dylan Baldi won’t go into great detail, the barrage of touring he’s done, including planning for his Australian tour, has begun to have an effect on his songwriting. It’s brought Cloud Nothings closer as a band and allowed them to better understand their own sonic abilities.

“The new songs are more of a group effort too, more than I thought they’d be. That’s the plan from here on out. I’ll bring in the songs, and everyone will add their part, but essentially the songs are finished.”

There may be an evolution within the band’s aesthetic, but Baldi is remaining tight-lipped about it. Instead, fans will just have to wait and see.

“Uh, yeah,” he says, after being asked if the band is indeed on a path towards a new sound. “The new songs we’ve been writing are reminiscent of Attack on Memory but have still managed to evolve in their own way. There’s definitely a progression; you never want to write the same song twice.”

BY JOSHUA KLOKE