dog eyes have a knack for the bittersweet.

On “sink” the Bay Area indie folk duo of Hailey Firstman and Davis Leach are back with the first piece of new music since 2025’s blue bird rain cloud EP. And it’s a bit of a tearjerker. “The song reckons with how hope can keep you in the wrong place for a long time,” says Firstman. In less capable hands, a line like “Wish I could say a hundred reasons why I love you / but I can’t lie to you, babe.” could come across as callous or cold. But voiced by dog eyes it just feels eternally sad and resigned. “We can wish those things till the sun goes down but that does not make them true,” adds Firstman. Woof.

The song is paired with a slightly more optimistic music video from director Clayton Standberry, starring Hailey and Davis. More from dog eyes soon.

Today marks the release of blue bird rain cloud, the new EP from dog eyes. The Oakland folk duo of Hailey Firstman & Davis Leach made their Grand Jury debut last year on the tranquil yet scrappy Holy Friend. Here, they open the aperture up thematically and ground the sonics in even more organic instrumentation and more inveterate Americana. The results are rewarding.

The band started the celebration earlier this week with the music video for semi-title-track “bluebird.” Like the song itself the clip, directed by Angela Zamora, is a gentle rush of nostalgia & yearning.

The EP is available on limited edition cassette here. The band plays a sold out release show next week in Oakland.

Last month, dog eyes announced their new EP blue bird rain cloud. It’s the follow up to last year’s holy friend, a song cycle with a distant and fragile quality that worked like a magnifying glass for life’s tiniest moments. On their new EP, the band maintain their light touch while approaching their arrangements with a newfound sense of adventure. This was immediately evident on the pulsing background synths of the EP’s first single “i remain,” and the duo’s sonic palette expands further on their latest single “nano,” everywhere today.

“nano” is a song about an ancient iPod re-envisioned as a lighthouse. Built around a looped piano, from which Firstman and Leach’s vocal layers expand outward, the track has a hypnotic beauty that recalls Sung Tongs-era Animal Collective, a spacier Florist, or a slightly gentler @.

Firstman says of the track: “Nano was born from Davis sending me some guitar he’d written and I experimented with singing over it. The lyrics were very stream of consciousness and culminated into a sort of dreamlike feeling, zooming in and out quickly from small to big. “Nano iPod, lighthouse in the fog,” is my favorite line, thinking back to childhood holding my beat up pink nano, it felt like I was holding a whole world. That concept in general feels very woven throughout the whole ep. Small feeling big and big feeling small.”

Get the limited edition cassette over on Bandcamp now.

dog eyes return today with “i remain,” the first single from their forthcoming EP, blue bird rain cloud, set for release on July 25th. Where their debut for Grand Jury, holy friend, kept its focus small, the latest EP from the Bay Area duo of Hailey Firstman and Davis Leach expands the aperture while maintaining the delicate sensibility of their last album.

“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.”

Lead single “i remain” 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.”

The EP is available for pre-order now, on a limited edition run of 200 pink cassettes over on our Bandcamp, with artwork pulled from a painting from the bands own Hailey Firstman.

blue bird rain cloud Tracklist:
01 bluebird
02 trophy, honey
03 nano
04 i remain, you stay the same
05 eyes

Fresh off of releasing their Grand Jury debut, dog eyes are back today to lend a hand in celebrating our 10th year in business. Back in May, we unveiled Samia’s take on the Twin Peaks barnburner “Making Breakfast,” a touchstone track from their 2014 album Wild Onion. Today, dog eyes spin their own version of “Joy,” a beautiful & gentle moment from the 2021 Hovvdy album True Love.

The track is the second in our 10th Anniversary project, where we’ve asked a handful of our bands, old and new, to tackle songs from the catalog. We’ll be back before the end of the year with tunes from TOLEDO, Haulm, & Jordana.

In the meantime, you can grab a 10th Anniversary limited edition tee over on our Bandcamp, designed by longtime GJ friend Vance Wellenstein.

Today marks the release of holy friend, the latest full-length from Oakland duo dog eyes. It’s a project that overflows with warmth and compassion. Mini-epics of lo-fi bedroom pop ambition, sleepy Americana and studies in slowcore abound across the ten tracks here. The band celebrated earlier this week with the release of a music video for final single, “drive,” a hushed indie folk number that arrives early on the album. A hometown East Bay Express profile landed earlier this week ahead of last night’s release show at Bottom of the Hill in SF.

Join us in welcoming this wonderful record into the world.

01 crush
02 firsts
03 rusty, my dog
04 drive
05 fair
06 moment
07 nothing at all
08 go together
09 ties
10 holy friend
[GET CASSETTE]

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 – announced today & their 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.  It’s a cornucopia of hushed & humble mini-epics. Across the record, there’s ethereal twee on “fair,” patient slowcore on “rusty, my dog,”  mossy indie folk on “drive”  and economical bedroom pop on “moment,” available everywhere today. 

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. On August 16th, 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.

01 crush
02 firsts
03 rusty, my dog
04 drive
05 fair
06 moment
07 nothing at all
08 go together
09 ties
10 holy friend
[PRE-ORDER CASSETTE]

dog eyes are back today with a new single, “rusty, my dog.”

It’s a daydream-y slowcore song that calmly floats on a gentle breeze. “Matching the minimalist bedroom pop and unexpected existentialism of Hovvdy’s early work with the surreal tinge of @, the track is another promising indication of what dog eyes’ Grand Jury debut will have in store,” said FLOOD Mag in their premiere this morning.

The duo sums up the single as “a grumbling, slow-and-steady meditation about Martin, our favorite dog. While light-hearted and sweet, it sends us off with chilling mantras like: ‘I don’t exist outside of his big ears,’ and ‘I’m not whole when you’re not around.’”.

The song follows “fair,” which was paired with our signing announcement last month via Paste Magazine , who praised it for being “a green-as-grass folk track with cosmic vocal harmonies that sound like acid-covered flannel shirts come alive.”

Both songs are from a larger project that will be announced soon. In other news, the band just announced an upcoming show at San Francisco’s Bottom of the Hill on August 15th. Tickets available here.

We try to listen to every demo submission we ever get. But over the past ten years, we’ve never signed a band out of the info@grandjurymusic.com pile. Until now.

Today we couldn’t be happier that we opened the email from Oakland’s dog eyes – the lo-fi duo of Davis Leach and Hailey Firstman. Their first Grand Jury single, which follows their 2022 debut album a good proper send off, is the playfully off-kilter “fair.” It’s anchored by a hooky bassline and a warbly acoustic guitar jangle in the verses, but kicks into a beautiful second gear with choruses of ethereal twee that find the middle ground between K Records and Slumberland, coordinates on the musical map we’d never really thought to visit before.

Paste premiered the song & video above this morning, calling the song “a green-as-grass folk track with cosmic vocal harmonies that sound like acid-covered flannel shirts come alive. It’s a truly delightful sound to behold, as dog eyes reckon with a relationships and friendships now-separated but, in the eyes of hope, never fully surrendered.”

We’ll have plenty more from dog eyes soon. For now, enjoy!