dog eyes

For a band that traffics in emotional extremes, dog eyes maintain a gentle touch.

The Bay Area indie folk duo of Hailey Firstman and Davis Leach aren’t writing first person confessionals. On their new EP, blue bird rain cloud, they’re far more interested in the pain and purity of the mundane or the ache and nag of the universal.

“Many of these songs are about extremes, powerful joys and grievances,” says Firstman. “But they are not set right in the middle of the moments, the action, rather they are told like memories, hazy and gentle.”

It’s that seemingly distant and fragile quality that forced the music world to take notice of their last record, 2024’s holy friend, a song cycle that worked like a magnifying glass for life’s tiniest moments. Here, the aperture has expanded, but that delicate breakability is still intact.

Lead single “i remain you stay the same” is built from simple parts: a patient acoustic guitar, hand claps in another room, and a swirling breeze of Firstman and Leach’s vocal. “You’re gonna give your loving heart away or I’ll remain, you stay the same,” goes the refrain. “It feels like a coming of age moment,” says Leach. “Coming to terms with how all things, including love, have to change over time for better or worse.”

“Nano,” a song about an ancient iPod re-envisioned as a lighthouse, uses a similar sonic tool kit. Trebley steel strings strum, piano notes twinkle like stars, all set against a whirring pedal note that the duo’s voices skip atop.

While these spare moments shine, that’s not to suggest the band can’t flesh out the instrumentation to great effect. On the half-title track “bluebird” a flock of woodwinds join the fray to support a wordless chorus of do do do’s that somehow sounds both resigned and hopeful.

“The EP title describes well the tension between joy and sorrow,” says Firstman. “How they are intrinsically related, constantly contextualizing each other. The EP lives in these moments big as love and loss or small as ants on a mound of dirt.”

“tophy, honey,” the EP’s most syrupy moment, features a languid bass line supporting a tide of acoustic guitars, setting up that key line: “As I reach out, sweetly, for the trophy sitting on a dirt mound.” “The line feels like making peace with the mundane and the small,” says Firstman. “The discarded being where we might find the prize, acceptance of that ideal feels most joyous.”

It’s at that very moment that a faint electric guitar lead emerges and gently, slowly turns the lights down on this profound EP.