For someone who’s spent nearly half his young life as a professional musician, Dylan Baldi still has solid work-life boundaries: The free jazz, ambient instrumentals, and acoustic experiments he’s posted to Bandcamp have yet to leach into the bottle-rocket pop-punk of Cloud Nothings. But the first single off their new album, Final Summer, has finally allowed one of Baldi’s extracurricular activities to infiltrate the band’s creative process. “I’m trying to [run] a marathon in every state,” he recently boasted, and while countless time trials and deadlifts have been set to “Stay Useless” and “Psychic Trauma,” “Running Through the Campus” suggests a more focused sort of cardiovascular exercise. “It’s just a thing I do for myself,” Baldi rasps, sounding like someone in tune with the discipline of physical and mental upkeep, and the usefulness of tracking incremental progress and pragmatic goals. That’s really where Cloud Nothings find themselves on their latest album, the first since Baldi entered his thirties. It’s a satisfying series of sprints from a band committed for the long haul.
Final Summer radiates a renewed sense of purpose for a band that had begun to feel like they were spinning their wheels. Up until the remotely recorded The Black Hole Understands, Cloud Nothings switched up producers on every album, lending a distinct character to records that otherwise work within a fairly narrow sound. Reuniting with Steve Albini on The Shadow I Remember drew on the goodwill generated by their most beloved album, yet it felt like a cheat code on a set of songs that lacked the frothing urgency of Attack on Memory. Just about everything leading up to Final Summer seemed to acknowledge the opportunity for a retooling, if not a total reboot: unexpected yet sensible new tourmates, new producer, new label, all signifying security in their status as a legacy band in 2024.
But you’d never guess any of that from the title track. A synth twinkles for a minute, and then another one, before the vocals enter. The mesmeric, three-note riff is more like amped-up Krautrock than spiky pop-punk. If the instrumental bridge doesn’t quite approximate Baldi’s alto sax recordings, it at least sounds like MIDI horns. Jayson Gerycz eases up on his typically runaway locomotion and propels “Final Summer” forward like a bullet train. At once instantly recognizable as Cloud Nothings and having no precedent in their catalog, “Final Summer” marks the first time in years that an entirely new lane has opened up for the band.
They quickly swerve back, yet “Daggers of Light” is a subtle reconfiguration of their past work, grafting the triumphal melodies of their singles to the ornery plod they typically reserve for the deep cuts. Meanwhile, “I’d Get Along” is Cloud Nothings concentrate, creating verse and chorus, tension and release, out of a single line. For all of its boneheaded brilliance, “I’d Get Along” can’t help but poke at a concern raised by the last few Cloud Nothings albums: Do they sound effortless because they’ve mastered their craft, or is it because they’re not pushing themselves?
“Silence,” or “Mouse Policy,” or, really, take your pick—they’re all melodic without being cloying, expressive without pandering, true believers in the enduring relevance of Hüsker Dü and the Replacements without devolving into “dudes rock” cliche. That was also true of The Shadow I Remember and The Black Hole Understands, which occasionally felt marooned between Cloud Nothings’ more bracing earlier work and a more considered, robust sound they had yet to achieve.
In the past, “ambition” on a Cloud Nothings song meant playing faster, stretching out for seven minutes, or doing both. That doesn’t happen on Final Summer. But the spiffier production sharpens the edge rather than dulling it, highlighting subtle flourishes that distinguish the deeper cuts from any random track six from a previous Cloud Nothings album: the harmonized punctuations on “Daggers of Light” balancing out the bile with psychedelic sweetness; the aural illusion of the title track’s endlessly repeating riff set against Chris Brown’s bass melodies; a melancholy piano line underscoring Baldi’s State of the Universe address on “Silence.”
“You can make any heaven you want/Why do you blow out every little light/And live in the dark?” Baldi asks on that song, ostensibly to the assorted bigots, fundamentalists, and climate-change deniers he addresses earlier on. His query might also be aimed, just a little, at the mirror—a challenge to make a Cloud Nothings album that meets the standards set by the ones with the black-and-white covers. In both its brighter sound and sentiment, Final Summer can be taken as a do-over of 2017’s underappreciated Life Without Sound, a shiny, sunny pop-rock album that led Baldi to claim, “I don’t want to feel like I’ve wasted my life anymore.” Certainly a change in outlook over “Wasted Days,” but not the same thing as welcoming serenity. “I need to be happy with what I got for me,” Baldi yells on Final Summer’s title track, realizing something that would have been frankly inconceivable on previous Cloud Nothings albums—that happiness is work, but it’s worth it. While passing through a quad full of college kids the same age he was when he started the project, Baldi muses, “Can you believe how far I have come?” Anyone who’s been listening since Turning On won’t either. Cloud Nothings have never sounded so committed to going the distance.
