Stratosphere

Sound DNA

• Alt/Indie
• Dream Pop

• dreamy
• brooding
• spacey

About

Toward the end of the 2010s, something strange happened to the sleepy and seemingly forgotten California trio Duster: The group exploded. Duster had formed in the 1990s and made two albums for the indie label Up before vanishing at the start of the millennium. But the group’s modest output took off as the streaming era began, and their long out-of-print records began fetching hundreds of dollars each on the used market. A Numero Group box set and reunion shows soon followed, and the arrival of TikTok led to even more excitement around the long-obscure sleepy psychedelic slowcore band. In the late 1990s, Duster’s music sounded like a secret—a gentle racket confined to the band’s home studio in San Jose. But two decades later, thanks in large part to their expansive 1998 debut, <i>Stratosphere</i>, the band’s misanthropic murmurs were now in full public view. At 17 tracks that span more than 53 minutes, <i>Stratosphere</i> is something of a playground, each corner offering up a slightly different idea—something new that might be tried. Its vocals etched between walls of distortion and buttresses of drums, “Echo, Bravo” reaches toward the heights of what would become post-metal, while the title track is a space-rock slow-burn, with waves of feedback spiraling around one another, and drums that feel like an expanding galaxy. “Inside Out,” their viral hit, is a beautiful bummer, voices softly asking for a little help or mercy over a slight three-piece march; “Reed to Hillsborough” amplifies and sharpens that same approach, buoyed by the production of Phil Ek at Seattle’s Avast! Recording. There are instrumental miniatures and tape-fuzzed jams that foreshadow coming waves of bedroom tinkerers, plus bits of exotica and spans of exquisite brooding. <i>Stratosphere</i> is less a single Rorschach blot than an entire deck of them. “We were broke and used what we had available to us,” Duster’s Clay Parton told <i>Vice</i> in 2018, just as the band’s unlikely renaissance ramped up. “A bunch of songs came together on cassette four-track machines, and then on 16-track tape machines, so there was an inherent limitation there.” In Duster’s wake, acolytes spotted those inherent limitations and ran with them, creating new worlds of their own from Duster’s quietly incensed atmospheres, where slowcore had teeth and space rock had the existential blues. The group, in turn, has become a touchstone for generations of bands that rescued Duster from the dustbin of indie rock anonymity.

via Apple Music

Tracklist

Credits