It would be wrong, however, to say that this is Dummy’s political record. Politics is at its heart but to hear Trainor tell it, that’s nothing new. “Maybe in the past people didn’t catch on, but a lot of our stuff is very political.” And besides, being the sort of “pandering political band that is very obvious,” as Ewell puts it, is not Dummy’s thing.
What different with do you love the color of the sky?, though, is the space given to vocals and its set of crystalline melodies. This is still an album of soundscapes and lush noise pop, but as Trainor explains, “this record was made in a way so that the instrumentals have a lot more room for the vocals to be the centrepiece of the songs, and that allowed Emma and Nathan [O’Dell, co-vocalist] to express what they're feeling more outwardly.”
It means that the record is Dummy couching those personal politics in a world of breakbeats, unshakeable grooves, and effortless melodies – enveloping you in their sonic world before you realise the new vision being presented to you in the real one. “It was always the point in the previous records to slip in the subversive to where you didn’t almost notice it. Now I think you notice it a little bit, but you can also dance to it,” Maatman tells me. Or, as Ewell puts it, “our original inspiration for the band was beautiful music with really devastating lyrics.”
And whilst they may have come good on that initial inspiration, a few years down the line from their formation there’s also a greater sense of intention to how Dummy do things, and a real sense of effort to make this album its own separate entity. “This was the first time we ever had songs cut that we recorded at the studio,” Trainor tells me, “so that was when we started really assessing the cohesion of all the tracks together.” But that time spent carefully constructing the album has made it the culmination of everything the band have learned across their previous releases. “It’s being able to achieve the things we were hearing in our heads all along. Now it feels like we’ve created this aesthetic that’s more distinctive and less referential than our previous records,” Ewell explains.