way up north in open water
up high in glacial sonder…
dolly sods crawls back into the room like they never left it, dragging a fresh storm behind them and shaking off the dust of two silent years. Buffalo’s shoegaze bruisers once built their name on floor-level volume and fog-thick mood, and now, with Monika Lux stepping behind the kit, they return sounding sharper (and stranger). good old neon, the first single from next year’s self-titled EP, oozes crooked sparkle, crooked sorrow, and crooked truth.
The band carries a diamond-in-the-rough charge: rough vocals slung over hazy guitars, the whole thing smudged at the edges like a half-remembered photograph. Here, the haze twists into something dream-warped and weird, brushing against a kind of grunge that wandered out of a nightmare instead of a garage. Jesse James sings like someone staring down a long hallway of thoughts; Nate Ward’s bass lines move with a low hum that borders on ritual. Lux, on the EP’s new recordings, beats out circular patterns that feel less like timekeeping and more like incantation.
The song’s internal map comes from the lyrics themselves, which roam through disconnection and cosmic unease. They move like drifting satellites, catching strange bursts of feeling before falling out of orbit again. good old neon is a meditation on the impossible gaps between people: those fault lines where meaning slips away no matter how hard you reach for it. The band’s own gloss completes the picture: “good old neon is about the vastness of the spaces in between people, the thoughts and feelings that slip through the cracks in our words which we could never actually communicate, that our experiences can never be shared totally, the quiet aches beneath the glow of neon,” says Jesse James.
What makes the track snap into focus is the way dolly sods plays tension like a borrowed instrument: tight, trembling, and oddly tender. The guitars swell like rising fog on a dead-end street. The drums churn in steady circles. The whole thing feels as if it’s building toward a confession nobody can quite say aloud, so the band just smears it across the sky instead.
The single is paired with a flashback to the 90s: bizarre psychedelic visuals waxing and waning between performance, stock footage, and flights of fantasy, directed by James Werick and the band.
Watch the video for “good old neon” below:
Catch them live – the dates are already inked in as dolly sods rise again: louder, stranger, and ready to scorch the frost off winter.
- Buffalo — 11.21.25
- Philadelphia — 12.12.25
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