Dehd
Blue Skies
PUT THIS IN YOUR DEN if you like to sing along with your indie/punk/garage/trashpop. This is easily one of the best albums of 2022. Give it a couple of listens and you'll be just as hooked as us. Get it before it is gone!
Available on "Poison Dart Frog" or "Stonewashed Opaque Blue Swirl" wax
Blue Skies is Dehd's first album for Fat Possum, and their follow up to Flower of Devotion, an album designated Best New Music by Pitchfork. Upon arrival during the fraught summer of 2020, Flower of Devotion felt like Dehd’s necessary prescription for us all. The Chicago trio had the audacity to look ahead when many of us didn’t, to imagine improvement through mere existence. It was an album we needed. We need its follow-up, the triumphant Blue Skies, even more.
Dehd’s fourth album is loaded with the most compelling, compulsive, and expansive songs of their career. Blue Skies offers another jolt of timely hope, only with twice the power. These 13 hits feel like flashlights in the dark, acknowledging how difficult everything from love and sex to living and dying can be while supplying the inspiration of their own experiences.
The writing is sharper and smarter on Blue Skies. The harmonies and rhythms are more sophisticated and considered. The moods are deeper, the swings between them more inspiring. But this is still Dehd, just more wild and wonderful than ever before. “This is all we get,” Emily shouts with relish on the record’s last lines, during a song about the ways geologic deep time should free us all to live more. “Best to take the risk.” Heard, loud and clear.
The rapturous reception of 2020’s Flower of Devotion gave Dehd access to more resources — budgets, studios, producers. Rather than seek something new however, they invested in themselves, their process, and their deep belief in what they have always done. They booked the same studio where they recorded Flower of Devotion but tripled their stay, giving themselves time to play with arrangements and delight in a wonderland of drum machines and synthesizers. While continuing to write and record every part of the album themselves, the new relationship with Fat Possum did allow for a few indulgences, namely in the addition of Grammy winning mixing engineer, Craig Silvey (The Rolling Stones, The National, Arcade Fire), and mastering engineer, Heba Kadry (Slowdive, Bjork, Cate Le Bon), ensuring Dehd’s vision for “Blue Skies."