Inside the Weird, Wild American Sounds of Dutch Interior

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here’s a peculiar rhythm to a Dutch Interior song, one that never quite settles where you’d expect it to. Guitars jangle and lurch, drums press forward then pull back, vocals arrive a half-step late or early, as if someone’s letting you in on something they’ve just realized themselves. The music of this six-piece L.A. County band feels loose on purpose, and it’s held together by something intuitive, a shared language that doesn’t need translating.

Dutch Interior’s members have known each other for years, but they tend to shrug off the significance of that biographical footnote. Yes, they’ve been friends since childhood. Yes, that probably explains the trust, sense of play, and seamless detours they take in the studio and up onstage. But Dutch Interior aren’t some happy-go-lucky bunch of pals goofing around — they’re pushing together toward wider, weirder horizons.

“We’re unified as friends, but we’re also really fucking serious about the art that we’re making,” says Jack Nugent (guitar, vocals), as the band huddles around a pair of tables pushed together in a dim corner of Greenwich Village’s storied Caffe Reggio. They’re an charming and energetic bunch, cracking jokes about our shared Orange County evangelical upbringings (four out of the six members got their start in church worship bands growing up, though they’ve all since “moved past it pretty heavily”) and the blanket fort they might build in their Bed-Stuy Airbnb later that night, while they’re in town for a sold-out gig at the Brooklyn venue Baby’s All Right. The bandmates piggyback off each other’s thoughts and finish one another’s sentences without any interjection feeling like an interruption. “We’re not making art because we’re friends,” says Hayden Barton, the band’s drummer. “We’re friends making art.” 

Unsurprisingly, six accounts of how Dutch Interior came together vary by one or two small details, but they unanimously recall the band’s formation as a happy “accident.” Since their teenage years, Nugent, brothers Hayden and Shane Barton (keys, vocals), Conner Reeves (guitar, vocals), Noah Kurtz (guitar, vocals), and Davis Stewart (bass, vocals) have played together in family house garages, joined various bands with one another, and lived together as roommates at different points in time. It wasn’t until Covid, though, that Reeves — who produces all of Dutch Interior’s music — showed up with an eight-track to one fortuitous Long Beach apartment hang, and the group recorded an album straight to tape in one week.

“We didn’t know a band was forming,” Reeves says. “We knew we were making a record.” That week-long session became Dutch’s impromptu 2021 debut, Kindergarten. Two years later, 2023’s Blinded By Fame — a gorgeously textured lo-fi triumph also recorded on an eight-track in Shane’s garage — solidified the promise of the band. 

“I had just gone through the most fucked-up breakup of my life,” remembers Nugent, who was living in his van in Yosemite when Dutch Interior started taking shape. “I was like, is there still a space for me here? Can I come home? I’ll do whatever it takes. I’ll sit in the back and play maraca or whatever.”

Midway through Dutch Interior’s latest and most realized album, Moneyball, sits a trio of songs that encapsulate the group fairly perfectly: a finger-plucked two-step country ballad adorned with dulcet harmonies (“Sweet Time”) gives way to the shoegaze-y, ambient rock of “Life (So Crazy),” which closes on a two-minute long trancey coda that billows forward every time you think it’s about to fade out. Then, a false start, a sharp inhale, and in comes indie rock’s catchiest guitar riff of the year with “Fourth Street,” a rapturous ode to home, the unforgiving passage of time, and the corridor apartment where the band planted its roots. 

Moneyball is the first album Dutch Interior has released through a label (Fat Possum Records), as well as the first they recorded in a studio they built themselves, but the inimitable DIY quality of the band’s first records still runs through the meandering tracklist. They say they didn’t even realize they were making an album for a label until it was almost completed. “It wasn’t supposed to be like, ‘Oh, this is our label debut, guys,’” says Stewart. “It’s like, ‘Fuck it. We’re a third of the way through making the same record we already would have made.’” 

The band has done its best to stick to the same limitations they faced on those early eight-track recordings, and meticulous about taking only “baby steps” forward. “In today’s music, people go from a demo EP to a fully produced studio record,” says Nugent. “We want a story. We want to progress.”

If the music had to be defined, it’d likely get slotted into a smattering of “alt-country,” “freak Americana” (the band’s own term), or “Southern rock” categories. Those descriptors are accurate enough, as the band themselves have been upfront and proud about their influences: Lucinda Williams, Fleetwood Mac, Neil Young, Bill Callahan, the Beatles. 

The band agree that Kurtz, the “chameleon” of the group, is often their guide toward distilling heavy inspiration into songs that feel unique. “Form begets content — this is some English major shit,” Nugent says. “Noah just takes form as an empty shell and fills it with something that it hasn’t been filled with before.” Kurtz is a bit more humble about it himself: “I’ve stolen everything I’ve ever made,” he says. Nugent is quick to push back: “Yeah, everyone has. Culture recycles itself. But I’ve always really been fond of your songwriting for that reason.”

“What I am against is trying to recreate something,” says Reeves. “I think so much of what makes our music special is that, not to say we’re experimental, but we are experimenting with throwing shit at the wall and seeing what sticks.”

He continues: “There’s a lot of wrong notes in our recordings. I think it was a John Prine quote that said that if a song can’t be done in eight tracks, then it’s not a good song. We try and lean into that. We’re focusing on the songwriting, but the production is lazy in a way and also experimental in a way to where it just makes it a little bit interesting and it’s imperfect.”

For all those twists and turns, the sentiments in Dutch Interior’s lyrics often have more of a cohesive feeling, chock full of western ennui and religious iconography. A casual listener could easily assume that Dutch’s discography follows the musings of one man’s road diary. That’s due in part to the fluidity and intense candor of each member’s writing. Five out of the six have songwriting and vocal credits — Hayden, the holdout, is eager to clarify that his own songs are coming soon — and the vulnerability they all divulge on their respective songs (they call them their “babies”) is a product of nothing less than shared reverence.

Take album closer “Beekeeping,” a devastating portrait of a failed relationship. “It’s not like I tried to be cruel or incomplete,” Shane sings, his weariness palpable on every word. “I just thought I owed you/So I endured you,” before a twangy instrumental flutters off into an abrupt ending. “What I really didn’t want to do was write a diss track,” he says about the track. “I wanted to write about how I failed in this relationship by just continuing to exist in it.”

Shane sees that honesty as reflective of the band’s dynamic. “I think our connection to each other makes it easier to bring that kind of song to the table,” he continues. “If we were a band of strangers and I brought this song, I would feel uncomfortable doing it. But with all these guys, I’m like, they know exactly. They know me.” 

“I don’t think there’s anything we wouldn’t bring up in conversation,” adds Nugent. “There have been several cases where someone will write a pretty deeply personal song, and everyone in the band is like, ‘I know exactly what’s happening here.’”

The title “Beekeeping” was a serendipitous play on words. The repeated refrain, “I should be keeping you warm,” was written first, and not until later did it click to Shane that tending to a bad relationship “kind of feels like beekeeping,” too. That kind of serendipity is a big part of Dutch Interior — just ask Stewart, who serves as the band’s main visual eye. 

“I’m mostly interested in trusting my gut and letting meaning assign itself later,” Stewart says. “Taking a signifier, alienating it from its meaning, then slapping it onto something else.” 

So, while the title Moneyball might bring to mind the bestselling book and film about the Oakland Athletics, its meaning to the band is less straightforward. “Spending money to win,” Shane muses. “I think about all of our disparate influences and songwriting and how we all come together and it works. That’s what it eventually came to mean to me.” 

It’s also a bit tongue-in-cheek. “I’m crazy fucking broke,” Reeves says. 

“Our original idea was that we wanted to call the record however much money we got paid in our advance,” Stewart adds. “The label didn’t think that was funny, so we had to switch over.”

Nugent, whose songwriting contributions include “Sandcastle Molds” and “Christ on the Mast,” echoes the point. “I had someone ask me about my lyrics at a show on this tour and they were like, ‘It’s so profound,’” he says, ” “I was like, ‘I didn’t mean shit by that.’ I think it’s the same thing. It’s like, we didn’t mean shit by Moneyball, but all of a sudden it works.”

It makes sense that Dutch Interior’s band name was chosen for a pretty simple reason: “It looks cool,” says Stewart.

He first encountered it as the title of a series of 1920s surrealist paintings in which Spanish artist Joan Miró depicted commonplace moments as more colorful and obscure — arguably the same thing Dutch Interior are doing with the Americana elements in their music, consciously or not.

“I saw the painting in person and was moved by it and then wrote down the name,” Stewart says. “And I was like, ‘That’s a good name. I’m going to steal that shit.’”