The Shadow I Remember

“It’s always a constant learning process,” Cloud Nothings frontman Dylan Baldi tells Apple Music. “Everything kind of deals with taking parts of old versions of the way I play guitar, or old versions of the way I thought about lyrics, and keeping the things that are good still and moving on with those.” For their eighth album, Baldi and drummer Jayson Gerycz wrote the bulk of the tracks at their home in Ohio. Once they scaled down nearly 30 demos into 11 songs, the band booked six days of studio time at Electrical Audio studios in Chicago to work with producer/audio engineer Steve Albini—who previously worked with the band on 2012’s Attack on Memory. The result finds Baldi dealing with the untidy emotions of aging, self-doubt, and relationships, challenging his pop impulses over churning, hook-filled songs. “We nailed everything down and practiced a lot before we went in, especially with this one, since we knew we only had six days,” Dylan says. “We're pretty self-critical in that way, so it can take us a long time sometimes to get everything done and mix it. If we had had seven days, it would have been perfect.” Here, Baldi guides us through every song on The Shadow I Remember.

Oslo
“I think this song encapsulates the theme of the album in general. And the lyrics are a little personal, but also a little bit drawn from this Norwegian movie that I watched around the time I was writing the song called Oslo, August 31st. It's about an ex-addict who's just gotten clean and out of rehab, and he's just trying to get back into life with his family and friends but he struggles with it. And so the movement of the song and the way it grows and the way the lyrics kind of play into it mimic the pace of that movie in a way. That's something I like to do sometimes—try to attach the dynamics of a song to a movie or something else that I've seen.”

Nothing Without You
“We brought in Macie [Stewart] because I had met her through my girlfriend's band's tour with Macie's band [Ohmme]. I had the chorus in my head, but I just can't sing that high. So Macie luckily lived right around the corner from the studio, and she was able to pop in. It's nice to be able to include friends into the process that way, because we had been pretty insular with however many records we've made.”

The Spirit Of
“There's a band I really like the singer of called Pinocchio. They're a New York punk band. I've really liked the way she sings and phrases things. I was influenced by her with the way I was trying to sing this song and the way I kind of spaced out all the little parts.”

Only Light
“This one actually came about because my girlfriend was like, ‘Why don't you ever write a nice song for me?’ And then I wrote this song, which essentially is about wanting to literally rend space and time and tear it apart and create this thing that exists, this other person that you would want to be around. So it's like a sci-fi love song.”

Nara
“I think this is probably the quietest Cloud Nothings song that exists, just because it's a little slower than everything we've done and is not as punishing to listen to. The guitar parts are cute in a way. And so it's just a little palate cleanser after the heaviness of 'Only Light.' I've never made a song that's almost like a ballad in that way.”

Open Rain
“I went through a period last year around December 2019 to January 2020 where my goal—which is so stupid—was to watch every new thing that came out on Netflix that month. And out of all the stuff that I fed my brain from just trying to watch all this garbage TV, Messiah really stuck with me because it was just a bizarre show that for some reason I was really into. Lyrically, the intensity that you're getting from in the song is literally about some mythical man who seems to have superpowers who comes by and starts a cult and the US government is trying to stop this Israeli cult. It's a fucked-up show, but yeah, the song is sort of about the cult mentality, I guess.”

Sound of Alarm
“That song is about starting more of a serious work ethic of songwriting, which is meta—it's a song about writing songs. Around the time I was making that song, and the whole process of making this record, I was really making a song every day. I would treat it almost like a nine-to-five job. I kept that practice up until very recently, when I got a dog and the dog took over my life. If you're doing it every day, you're not going to make the best song in the world every day, but it's nice to have the practice of doing it.”

Am I Something
“The thing I really like about this one is the video that came out with it by the Chinese artist Lu Yang. She took the meaning of the song to be about the Bardo, which is the waiting period between life and death. I liked that she took that interpretation of the song, because it wasn't exactly what I was thinking. I was thinking about being down in the dumps sometimes as if it were a question, and she took it in a way more metaphysical way. It's a better interpretation of the song and gives it a little more weight than just me writing about my own problems.”

It’s Love
“I really wanted to write single-note guitar parts, which is something I would have shied away from in the past. I was doing that little single-note guitar thing that sounded like the Power Rangers theme. So that one kind of came out of just wanting to follow different impulses that weren't, like, 'verse, chorus, verse.' It's also nice to break up the flow of those kinds of songs with things that are a little more experimental in terms of structure. My parents were the first people who heard this track, and my mom said the song sounded like Philip Glass—which is so funny to me because I don't agree. I said, 'Cool mom.' Not every mom's going to tell you your song sounds like Philip Glass.”

A Longer Moon
“We had our friend Brett play on it, because he's kind of a synth wizard. He came and did a little bubbling at the end of the song just to keep things really crazy-sounding. This is one of these songs that could've been a 10-minute song if we wanted it to be. Lately, I've liked keeping songs short. So yeah, keeping the jam really focused at the end of this one felt like a good move to me.”

The Room It Was
“This is one of my favorite ones, because it's like a poppier kind of song. It has a defined sort of chorus and it's very melodic, but it also feels dark in a really pleasant way for me. The end of this one was something I was particularly obsessed with, because I wanted to make it really intense—so I'm screaming at the end. Some of the words I'm really yelling, but I wanted to make it really pretty because I knew it was the last thing that's going to happen on this record. It's a nice way to go out, because the record starts kind of pretty and slow and I feel like ending it by going full circle in that way. It feels like just a good way to draw things to a close.”