Cloud Nothings focus on the music, not the fans
Dylan Baldi is sitting in his car, taking a breather from the latest in a recent rash of band practices. His band Cloud Nothings is rehearsing and recording demos in a warehouse somewhere in Cleveland — “For the landlord’s sake, let’s not say where,” he says — preparing for its one-off gig with In The Whale and the Epilogues at Denver’s Hi-Dive tonight.
In other words, a standard Wednesday for a scrappy 24-yearold who’s made rock his career, right? Not so fast. “Career? It’s kind of stupid to call it that,” Baldi says.
It’s not that Cloud Nothings hasn’t found its audience — the three-man band has released four albums of skin-prickling postpunk since 2011. It’s the connotations of that C-word that bother Baldi. “To be honest, I still don’t think anyone likes the band,” he says. “I know that’s not true, but I force myself to think that way so I don’t have to worry about it.”
Cloud Nothings has so far been an unassuming success. Baldi’s vocal-frying growl, deceptive ear
for melody and plainly scrawled songwriting are the heart of a sound they’ve hit squarer on each successive record. In 2012, the band worked with revered music industry producer and iconoclast Steve Albini on their breakout third album, “Attack On Memory,” only to top that with 2014’s “Here and Nowhere Else.” Despite that trajectory, there’s nary a rumble of buzz for the band’s next record. You get the sense that Baldi could dissolve Cloud Nothings as easily as take it for another spin around the touring circuit.
That’s by design. From its inception, the singer rarely beset the project with the pressure to be anything beyond a creative outlet. Baldi formed Cloud Nothings in college as a one-man MySpace project. It became a fulltime gig after a concert promoter contacted him to play a show in New York in 2009. Only then did Baldi form Cloud Nothings. They made the show, and voilà! A career — er, paid musician — was born.
In recent weeks, the band has been recording demos for its follow-up to “Here and Nowhere Else,” which it hopes to release by year’s end. “Parts of it sound different to me than our old stuff so far,” Baldi says of the record. “I don’t really know what we sound like, though.” Despite staking his name to post-punk, Baldi admits he doesn’t really listen to his own genre. Instead, he and the band have been on an electronic kick in recent months, to the extent that Cloud Nothings’ drummer Jayson Gerycz and bassist TJ Duke are starting a tape label aimed at putting out Cleveland’s nuggets of experimental music. “We’ve been making a lot of minimalist techno jams lately,” Baldi adds.
Whether or not the next Cloud Nothings album sounds anything like that, Baldi doesn’t worry about disappointing anyone other than himself. “People can be fickle,” he says, “and opinions can change without you feeling like you’ve done anything differently anyway.” Nothing matters except for the thing of making music.
Maybe that’s why Cloud Nothings isn’t a coffee-household name yet. It’s not that Baldi doesn’t care about having fans — it’s that he doesn’t need them. Hence the lack of Cloud Nothings fans mobbing him like the now-defunct boy band One Direction in his native Cleveland. Or anywhere, for that matter. “I’m pretty glad that hasn’t happened,” he says. “I really don’t want us to end up like One Direction.”