“We made a few on vinyl in 2020 to sell through Bandcamp because we needed money during the pandemic,” says singer-guitarist Dylan Baldi via a Zoom call from his Philadelphia home, where he was out on a morning walk. Cloud Nothings open for Superheaven at 7 p.m. on Friday, Sept. 19, at the Agora Theatre. “The pandemic had just set upon us, and we couldn’t tour or even see each other. We got really good at emailing files back and forth. I would make a song and send it to [drummer] Jason [Gerycz]. I would record everything on top of it. It was that kind of process. We ended up making a ton of songs. That’s what these two records are sourced from. It’s already been five years, so we realized it made sense to put them out to the rest of the world.”
The Black Hole Understands represents the first ten songs from the batch. As time went on, the group realized that some of the other tracks from the same sessions were pretty good as well.
“Life Is Only One Event was super limited,” says Baldi. “That one wasn’t even on Bandcamp. It was just for people who subscribed. It was like the B-sides to Black Hole Understands, and those songs are really pretty good.”
The group took a similar approach when it came time to write the songs that would be its newest album, Final Summer. It wrote the tunes remotely but then recorded them during a week-long session at Jeff Zeigler’s studio in Philadelphia.
“We were not getting together as much when we started working on the album,” says Baldi. “We recorded it in person, which is something we haven’t done in a while. When we went to do it, we had never played the songs together in room. We had never done that before. I like playing and practicing together first. It was the culmination of this long new practice of working remotely. Now, luckily, it’s easier to be together and play music together because that is more fun.”
Baldi says he constantly writes, and the band is already putting together the tunes for a new studio album.
“I try to write a song a day just to keep the juices going,” he says. “If I get stuck, I still write and you just make a bad song. You say, ‘Today, that’s what I did. At least I did something.’ Hopefully, that clears the block, and the next song is okay. We have a couple of different ways we could take the new album. Some of it is pretty heavy and intense, almost like a metal record. There’s a side of stuff that’s super poppy like some of the more poppy Cloud Nothing songs from the past. It’s hard to decide if I should meld them or just do two different albums. A whole new type of sound might be fun, or it might just confuse people. Black Flag got pretty weird by the end. They started as a hardcore band, but they started doing eight-minute songs, which were really cool.”
The band has so many songs its back catalog at this point; the group nearly rivals the prolific Ohio-based Guided by Voice.
“We have ten records in the world and then during the pandemic, we had a subscriber thing going online,” says Baldi. “I think we made another 100 songs that are exclusive for Bandcamp people. We have a lot of songs but are not yet Guided by Voices level. Those guys aren’t really out there. Maybe there is some Ohio working class mode. Maybe we’ll keep doing it until I don’t have hands or something.”
Baldi says the upcoming Agora show will mark the first time the Cloud Nothings have ever played the historic venue.
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This article appears in Cleveland SCENE 10/8/25.
