Dovetail Expands Their Sound on “if you let me (nsii)”

Almost a year has passed since Dovetail released “raining here, too,” a track that felt less like a single and more like a secret passed between close listeners. Last fall, the duo—Brynne Mershon and Naomi Sullins—brought that intimacy to New York’s Night Club 101, opening for Ken Park in angel wings while their songs swallowed the room. Now they’ve returned with “if you let me (nsii),” a single that stretches both backward and forward.

Sullins originally wrote the song in high school, long before Dovetail existed. Bringing it into the duo’s format meant reworking it from the ground up. “We’re still drawing from a lot of the same influences as ‘raining here, too’—’90s-era dream pop and shoegaze (Slowdive, Mazzy Star) and 2000s lo-fi singer-songwriter projects like the Microphones,” Mershon says, “but are expanding our sonic palette with some grunge and psych influences on this track.”

That expansion is subtle. The track still moves like a slow-burning sprawl, ethereal and slightly haunted, but there’s a weight in the guitars that wasn’t there before—a fuzz that edges out of the dream and into something more grounded. It’s a fitting next step for a band that seems built on reconsideration: of solo demos, of inherited genres, of their own quiet mythology.