Dummy Rejects Modern Trends on do you love the color of the sky?
Theodora Gatsacos
Writer
October 21, 2026
Pop music chases trends. What happens when a band ignores these trends completely?
Indie band Dummy answers this question with their anti-zeitgeist album, do you love the color of the sky? The Los Angeles-based group, consisting of Emma Maatman, Alex Ewell, Nathan O’Dell, Joe Trainor, and Lance Umble, brings their futuristic experimental sound to new heights to comment on the state of the world and its effects on today’s music and the environment.
“April Limousine,” “Alluvial Fan,” “Full Spectrum Dominance,” and “N of 1” were released as pre-release singles. The first release, “Full Spectrum Dominance,” details artificial intelligence’s impact and how AI takes from human creation to generate results, with humans in this case being referred to as “Prima Materia,” the building block of all matter.
“April Limousine” and “Alluvial Fan” were pre-released together and serve as the album’s opening tracks, with the first song including references to every other song on the album, as well as some cut demos, ending with the question, “do you love the color of the sky?” The album’s second song, “Alluvial Fan,” according to O’Dell, was inspired by the phenomenon of alluvial fans, which occurs when sediments such as gravel, sand, or boulders fan outward from a concentrated source of sediments. The lyrics compare the concept of alluvial fans to breaking off and being freed from mass digital connection, which O’Dell says “blurs the lines of our human reality and a sense of self.”
The final pre-release track, “N of 1,” discusses constantly being watched and under surveillance, with the music video showing the band being tracked and recorded.
The way Dummy emphasizes their unique sound is through the use of the guitar instead of tools such as synths. In fact, only “Full Spectrum Dominance” and “Song of Man” use synthesizers. Trainor states in an interview that “The rest of the record is all processed guitars, sampling ourselves, chopping up the guitars, chopping up the vocals, and […] using the guitar as a sound generator.” The instrumental “C.B.B.S.I.M.M.P.W.M.,” the meaning of which has not been clarified, is a reversed guitar loop created by hitting the guitar with a drumstick.
With the increased use of AI today, Dummy goes against the norm, not even using laptops in the creation of do you love the color of the sky? Between AI, devaluation of art, climate degradation, increased surveillance, and technology blurring reality, the band strays from what’s trendy to create an original record using instruments to their limit. As Maatman says in Squeaky Wheel, “What a time to be alive.”
Edited by: Daniel Corretjer-Rios
Comments