Dylan Baldi Started Cloud Nothings by Accident, But It's Going Pretty Well So Far

Without easy access to the local scene at large, Baldi did what’s second nature to most kids his age: He took to the web and built a scene of his own.

(Courtesy of cloudnothings.com)
By Pete Cottell

Cloud Nothings is, for all intents and purposes, a punk band. If it were two decades ago, the sound and aesthetic of the Cleveland group would be closely aligned with the angsty guitar rock that dominated rock radio in the wake of Nirvana's mainstream success. It's fair to hear 25-year-old frontman Dylan Baldi's unhinged and listless delivery and assume he honed his abilities by sweating it out in the basements and bars of Northeast Ohio. But any similarities in his path from obscurity to acclaim to that of his heroes quickly diverges from there.

"I didn't really go to a lot of shows," Baldi says. "I didn't have any money or a way to get to it, so I just stayed home and played guitar in my room and listened to CDs. That was my high school existence—very insular."

Without easy access to the local scene at large, Baldi did what's second nature to most kids his age: He took to the web and built a scene of his own. Using the family computer, Baldi released a flurry of music under a variety of names to delineate between one project and the next. It could've been an ambient or dub project that caught the attention of the internet, but it happened to be the pop music he filed away as Cloud Nothings that grew legs. When Vivian Girls drummer Fiona Campbell reached out to him in 2009 to play a show in New York with Woods and Real Estate, Baldi was in utter disbelief that the offer was real.

"Blowing up on the internet before even playing a show doesn't seem like a thing that happens much anymore," Baldi says. "It's usually someone who pretty clearly knows what they're doing, not someone like us who's like, 'Whoops! I'm in a band now!'"

In addition to completely sidestepping the DIY salad days, Baldi was surprised to learn how accessible a blockbuster recording engineer can be if you just ask. Since enlisting famed In Utero producer Steve Albini to man the boards on Cloud Nothings' 2012 album, Attack on Memory, the internet has been steadily buzzing about Baldi's ability to hit the sweet spot between sleek and powerful production with raw punk energy.

On this year's Life Without Sound, Cloud Nothings enlisted John Goodmanson, whose work with artists as disparate as Hanson and Sleater-Kinney appealed to the group's newfound interest in psyching out listeners with a record that's glossy on the outside and chaotic on the inside. If you've been roped in by the bouncy hooks on cuts like "Internal World" or the lead single, "Modern Act," Baldi offers caution to concertgoers expecting an easygoing experience.

"When we just get together and play those songs, some of them are really heavy and noisy and scary," he says. "The other stuff is like, 'Yep, you heard the record. Come see us play it live, it sounds exactly the same.' Whereas this one sounds really pretty until you see it live and think, 'Wow, that's really loud and annoying.'"

SEE IT: Cloud Nothings plays Doug Fir Lounge, 830 E Burnside St., with Itasca, on Wednesday, Feb. 15. 9 pm. $18. 21+.

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