For the better part of two decades, Duster’s small catalog was handed down like a myth. From one smoky dorm room to another, one road-worn Econoline van to the next, their records spread primarily through passionate word of mouth. Their insider status suited their songs, which they’ve since termed “experimental depressed music”—it’s never been the sort of stuff that naturally generates headlines. Nearly every word on those early records is sung in a grave whisper, so their followers responded in kind, keeping the music like a secret.

Listening back, the music that Clay Parton, Canaan Dove Amber, and Jason Albertini made together is diffuse, without much pretense or expectation. Even 2000’s Contemporary Movement, the last album of the band’s initial run and easily their most accessible, feels beautifully haphazard and exploratory. Like many of their labelmates on Up Records at the time—including Quasi, Built to Spill, and Modest Mouse—they found magic in a free-associative take on indie rock, playing their songs as if remembering them from dreams. And then they receded into the shadows for almost 20 years. The story, as it’s most often told, suggests that the band more or less vanished while their legend grew.

But during their ostensible hiatus, the members of Duster continued making music both together and separately. Albertini’s Helvetia carried on the slow, sad spirit of Duster’s best songs, often accompanied by Amber. Parton’s Static Cult label released some of those records, while Parton continued making similarly distraught solo music music as Eiafuawn. So while it’s tempting to view Duster’s recent activity—touring, a Numero Group box set, and now a new album—as a reemergence, the band sees it as a continuation. They just kind of spaced out for a little while.

True to their word, their new, self-titled album bears all the hallmarks of classic Duster records: plodding drums, skeletal basslines, and guitar work that sparkles in the darkness like dew on a cobweb. The songs hiss menacingly in the unpredictable way that their early tape recordings did, as if their four-track had begun to resent them for all the feedback and bummer vibes. They recorded this album live in Parton’s garage, which no doubt supplies some of the songs’ chilly precarity. Per Parton, the only difference now that they’re older is that they buy blank cassettes on eBay rather than “steal[ing] them from the drugstore.”

Even at their clearest, the lyrics on Duster’s older records tended to get clouded out by tape fuzz and static. And yet, you could always tell that, whatever they were singing about, things weren’t going well. Parton has described the overall tone as “purring distress,” a sensation that’s more legible on the new album. “I’m Lost” consists of the dreary refrain “Don’t you know I’m lost?” over an appropriately circuitous guitar riff that feels like getting caught in a thought loop. On “Summer War,” Duster sing explicitly of the apocalypse, of how the “end is coming to take us home.” One of the most surprising moments is “Go Back,” on which the band builds soaring melodies out of ultra-minimal guitar leads, feedback, and static as they sing about lost innocence and a fall from the garden. Like something the Jesus and Mary Chain might pray in a particularly dissociative state, it’s desperate, weightless, and impossibly sad.

In an interview with Vice last year, Parton explained that changing times have only underscored longstanding Duster philosophy. “We didn’t feel like we belonged in this world before,” he said. “And the world is only an even bleaker hellscape now.” Duster holds a mirror to that world, offering existentially troubled lyrics over droney, drawn-out instrumentals. It’s of a piece with the music they’ve always released, but there’s something hopeful in that. Even if you wake up one day 20 years from now and don’t recognize the hellish world around you, you can still press on the way you always have, with your friends at your side.

Buy: Rough Trade

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