dog eyes

dog eyes, the lo-fi Oakland duo of Davis Leach and Haily Firstman, want to talk about friendship.

holy friend, the pair’s sophomore release –and first for Grand Jury Music– is a gentle 10-song ode to all types of relationships, an examination of the effect we have on the most important people in our lives.

Leach & Firstman were friends before they were bandmates, finding each other through mutual connections at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo in California. They bonded over a shared love of two-person songwriting teams like Hovvdy & @, and Leach helped produce Firstman’s previous project Mr Marigold. The collaboration was so fruitful it turned into a whole new band.

“I don’t think when we first started working on it we realized how involved we’d get in the process,” says Firstman. “We thought we’d maybe spend a weekend or two, but we both got so into it that it turned into a year and through that time we realized we like working together, we became friends, and we wanted to keep making music.”

That music they’re making together has turned into a cornucopia of hushed & humble mini-epics. Across holy friend there’s ethereal twee on “fair,” patient slowcore on “rusty, my dog,” mossy indie folk on “drive” and economical bedroom pop on “moment.” Each, in its own way, glows with hope from the inside out, radiating the same kind of familiarity and warmth as a conversation with an old friend.

So the album title is fitting. The band describes the concept of a “holy friend” as an imaginary person you place on the ultimate pedestal, a kind of Frankenstein vessel that houses the best qualities about the people in your life. It’s bittersweet, an unattainable perfection always slightly out of reach. But it also serves as a guiding principle, something to strive for that simultaneously reminds you it’s impossible to be perfect.

As Firstman puts it, “the ‘Holy Friend’ as a concept, creates an ideal person from scraps of perfection/the divine we find in flawed places. Hopeful, yet grounded, the “Holy Friend” is a testament to the idea that age brings nuance. Something bigger than the sum of its parts that helps guide us, rooted and reflected in the nuance of friendship.”

The band wasn’t nearly as conceptual with their debut, good, proper send off, which they self-released in 2022. “Our vision for ‘good, proper sendoff’ was a lot more pared down and simple,” says Leach. Where good proper send off was a record filled with field recordings, fuzzy radio static and fragile folk, holy friend levels up the ambition and expands the sonic horizons. In August, Grand Jury will release that document, a limited edition cassette featuring holy friend on the A-side and good, proper send off on the B-side.

The two releases paint a vivid picture of Leach & Firstman’s holy friendship.