DIRT BUYER - III

'Dirt Buyer III begins with a song about sports. "Baseball/ Is somethin'/ I'll never get, but I/ Sleep on it/ Wake up/ And try again," Joe Sutkowski coos over loping-then-roaring distorted guitar. But of course, anyone familiar with the emotional depths of Dirt Buyer's music knows Sutkowski isn't simply singing about America's favorite pastime. "It's about growing up with certain expectations and adhering to them for no reason other than doing what you're told," Sutkowski explains. "The song is about gaining autonomy and independence." In its opening moments, Dirt Buyer III goes back to origin stories, to disconnects hard-wired in childhood, to set up an album that, from there, is a visceral document of navigating the same trials in adulthood. When Dirt Buyer II arrived in 2023, it had already been sitting on the shelf for three years. By then, all the songs had been written for Dirt Buyer III, pouring out of Sutkowski during a particularly tumultuous stretch of life. Where in the past he would write the amount of songs necessary for an album and head right into the studio, here he had amassed more than two dozen tracks. Mere weeks after II found its way into the world, Sutkowski was recording III. "I was so ready to do something else," he explains. He was ready to put these years behind him. In the same way there was a sonic leap from the homemade recordings of Dirt Buyer to the moderate studio polish of Dirt Buyer II, Sutkowski's music has again undergone a logical but substantial evolution between albums. The bones are the same: ragged acoustic guitars, electric riffs chiming autumnally then caustic and overdriven, drums staggering forward with the same desperate pace with which Sutkowski passed through these years. Then, his voice above it all: plaintive, weaving, breaking at times and finding new power in others. Buoyed by the bulletproof structures of these songs and more muscular production, Dirt Buyer III presents the fullest, most immersive version of Sutkowski's sound yet. In October of 2023, Sutkowski joined his friends Hayden Ticehurst and Chris Cubeta at Brooklyn's Studio G. He showed them all the demos, and together the trio culled it down to the "heaviest hitters of the bunch," narrowing in on the 11 compositions featured on III. "We knew what the songs were going to be, and we tackled everything head on," Sutkowski says. Still, they took their time getting everything just right, with recording, mixing, and finishing touches scattered across a year. As a result, Sutkowski has never been more proud of a Dirt Buyer album, adding: ""The finished product is the best representation of where I'm at now as a songwriter.."

Vinyl release of Dirt Buyer - III. Released through BAYONET RECORDS and available on LP.