Los Angeles quartet Dummy have unveiled two new singles, April Limousine and Alluvial Fan, accompanied by a new video directed and edited by keyboardist Emma Maatman. Both tracks are taken from the band’s forthcoming third album, do you love the color of the sky?, which arrives on 16th October via Polyvinyl.
Dummy
The new record sees Dummy push their distinctive blend of experimental pop, shoegaze, electronic music and post-rock into more politically charged territory, while retaining the infectious grooves and melodic instincts that have defined the band’s work to date.
Comprised of Alex Ewell, Emma Maatman, Nathan O’Dell, Joe Trainor and Lance Umble, Dummy have spent the period since their 2024 album Free Energy developing their sound through an intense touring schedule. The band played approximately 113 shows across around 150 days, including extensive US touring and two European trips, bringing their music to increasingly larger stages and allowing their live experience to directly shape the new album. “Touring has had a huge impact on us and our music,” Ewell explains.
That experience is reflected in do you love the color of the sky?, a record that deliberately resists being neatly reproduced on stage. Rather than attempting to create a polished studio replica, Dummy embrace the unpredictability and physicality that comes from five musicians constantly testing the boundaries of their material.
The album’s opening track, April Limousine, provides an introduction to that world while also functioning as a kind of musical map for what follows. According to Maatman, the song contains references to every other track on the album, including demos that ultimately did not make the final record. “It leaves you with the thesis statement and the question, ‘do you love the color of the sky?’” she says.
The song also confronts the degradation of the planet, setting the political tone for an album that explores environmental anxiety, technological advancement and the changing relationship between humanity and the world around it.
The accompanying video develops those ideas visually, contrasting the beauty of nature with the growing chaos of technological progress. That tension leads directly into Alluvial Fan, where guitarist Nathan O’Dell and drummer Alex Ewell build a track around stretched-out chords, pulsing rhythms and hypnotic textures.
The song moves between dream-pop atmosphere and jungle-influenced electronics, while O’Dell’s vocals provide another layer to Dummy’s increasingly expansive sound. Melodic lines from Maatman, Ewell and O’Dell remain central to the track, giving the experimental arrangements a strong pop sensibility.
Maatman directs the accompanying visual, in which O’Dell becomes increasingly drawn towards the wires surrounding him by an unexplained force. The imagery mirrors the song’s themes of technological connection, identity and the possibility of becoming consumed by an increasingly interconnected digital world.
O’Dell explains that the lyrics combine imagery inspired by a 2000s anime exploring mass digital connection with the natural phenomenon of alluvial fans — geological formations created when sediment spreads out as flowing water leaves a confined channel. The track also features guest vocals from Allyson and Paul of New Issue, adding another dimension to Dummy’s layered vocal approach.
Together, April Limousine and Alluvial Fan offer an early glimpse of an album that embraces contradiction. do you love the color of the sky? is Dummy’s most politically trenchant release to date, yet the band deliberately wraps those ideas in music that remains inviting, rhythmic and playful.
Breakbeats, shimmering guitars, electronics and Maatman’s captivating vocals create an enveloping sound that allows the album’s ideas to emerge gradually. The politics are not delivered as lectures; instead, they become part of the atmosphere, encouraging listeners to move while simultaneously confronting questions about the future.
The album follows Free Energy, which marked another step forward for the band and explored the euphoria of rave culture and Madchester alongside Dummy’s experimental instincts. Its subsequent remix album, Bubbelibrium DLC, further demonstrated the group’s willingness to pull apart and reconstruct their own music.
For the new record, Dummy turn their attention towards a more uncertain future, drawing on the textures of post-rock, drone, dream pop and electronic music while retaining a colourful pop sensibility. The result is a record that can move from abstract experimentation to immediately memorable melodies without losing its sense of identity.
The band’s influences remain broad, but their approach is anything but nostalgic. Dummy are less interested in recreating a particular era than in taking elements from different musical worlds and finding ways to make them work together in the present. That same philosophy extends to their work ethic. Their relentless touring since Free Energy has changed how the band approach both performance and songwriting, with hundreds of hours spent travelling and playing together feeding directly into the creative process.
There is a deliberately tongue-in-cheek quality to the band’s assertion that “making music shouldn’t be fun,” but beneath the joke is a serious commitment to the process of making something worthwhile. For Dummy, experimentation comes through repetition, touring, collaboration and a willingness to discard ideas and start again.
do you love the color of the sky? consequently represents a creative leap without abandoning the qualities that make Dummy recognisable. The songs remain rhythmic, melodic and often joyous, but underneath those surfaces is a growing sense of uncertainty about technology, environmental collapse and the direction of modern life.
With April Limousine and Alluvial Fan, Dummy introduce an album that asks difficult questions without sacrificing the pleasure of listening — music designed to make both the body and the mind move.
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