Dummy Turn Themselves Into the Remixers on Their Third Album

Dummy have always treated texture as a structural element rather than decoration, and their third album pushes that instinct further than before. do you love the color of the sky? arrives after a year in which the Los Angeles group were the ones being reworked: Bubbelibrium DLC, the companion record to 2024’s Free Energy, handed their material to other hands. This time they do the deconstructing themselves.

The band remains a guitar, keyboard, bass and drum outfit with hundreds of shows behind it, but that live history now feeds a self-recorded sample library, cut up and reassembled across the record. Vocals from Emma Maatman and Nathan O’Dell still sit high in the mix, though the backing has shifted toward electronic abstraction.

Opening track “April Limousine” moves on breakbeat sputter and repetition, almost no recognizable guitar in earshot, with Maatman turning the album’s title into a question aimed at corporate-driven climate damage. Lead single “Full Spectrum Dominance” works a similar contrast: wah-wah guitar and a baggy bassline underneath a rebuke of AI companies profiting from artists’ labor.

The two longest cuts, “Squeaky Wheel” and “Song of Mana,” both at 6:23, run on minimal electronics and weightless tension, the latter sliding from ambient pop into acid techno. “Omen Globe” compresses the same impulses into something tighter and more immediate.

What holds the album together is its refusal to separate pleasure from argument. Dummy sound most like themselves when the two are playing at once.