My Degeneration: Cloud Nothings' Dylan Baldi spills on Here and Nowhere Else

Dylan Baldi, unspooling the morning, slouches on the double bed of his low-rent Cleveland apartment. The singer’s hometown property has somehow survived his relocation, for love, to Paris, and despite his modest income the suggestion of subletting seems to crawl in his skin: “I don’t like when people sleep in my bed,” he grumbles, tersely. “I just, I like to have a clean bed.”

Sleeping arrangements aside, Baldi seems totally relaxed. You might be surprised. On fourth album Here and Nowhere Else, out on Wichita this month (and reviewed here), he sounds fierce, contemptuous, permanently affronted. But his demeanour is chilled – jolly, almost – and by virtue of his hurtling tunes, massive acclaim and righteous lyrics, Baldi has become not just angst-free and world-ready but a kind of role model, a de facto ambassador for shut-ins.

Still, maybe it’d be overkill to describe Baldi as happy. It’s hard to say exactly what he is. Certainly he believes he’s happy – or at least, in his company, you believe that he believes it – and though his laughter can seem reluctant, scrambling back down the windpipe, it’s true that it is charming and frequent, a laugh that insists, Here I am, taking on the day; a pop-punk man with nothing to prove!

Not to overanalyse: the 22-year-old is pretty much like any post-adolescent: moderately insecure, passionately noncommittal and overall unsure whether he’s happy, depressed, somewhere in-between or nowhere at all. He left college after three weeks and, despite living a year in France, barely recognises the language. His Parisian assessment resembles the kind of ringing endorsement you’d hear from Nevermind-era Cobain: “It’s nice,” he says. “It’s cooler than Cleveland.”

Baldi met his girlfriend at a Cloud Nothings show in Paris, but that subject, like his bed, is off limits. “It’s not important at all! This is so funny.” Naturally we’re intrigued; was she a fan? “I don’t think she wanted to be at the show. I think she was there because her friends were there. But then we, I dunno...” He chuckles suggestively, prematurely concluding, “and that was that!”

A furtive storyteller, perhaps, but Baldi is a veritable master of pop-punk songwriting. Attack on Memory, his 2012 breakout, harvested the dread of economic blackout and stormed the year’s hotbed of heavier indie-rock. As the Men singed minds, Metz got Wasted and Japandroids riffed windswept, Cloud Nothings alloyed the Wipers’ strop-punk with the Replacements’ beseeching blues (a formula carried into Here and Nowhere Else) to give a bleakly melodic youth forecast, their days wasted and plans spent.

"Most people think you join a band to become a drug addict, but I would've stayed in college and done that" –Dylan Baldi

Following Baldi’s daintier incarnation as a one-man bedroom-pop act, it was a rousing, riotous effort: the record, as well as being a lighthouse to the darkly post-adolescent, was designed to animate a generation deceived en masse by politicians and advertisers. “I thought! I would! Be more! Than this!” roared Baldi on Wasted Days, his tone less self-loathing than confrontational. Sure we’re fucked, he conceded, but hey, fuck you for fucking us.

Ironically it was Attack on Memory’s whip-smart take on stasis that proved Baldi’s lifeline. And while he claims the record sprang not from genuine intensity so much as a sonic affinity for intense music, its inception was hardly breezy. “When I was writing that record, I’d been in the band for two and a half years and nobody liked us,” he observes, “which was sort of depressing. At a certain point it starts to get you down. You’re touring the world and nobody’s coming to your shows. It’s different if you’re just playing local stuff – that’s fine – but if you’re really trying to make something of it, it’s sad. So I just wasn’t feeling great when I wrote Attack on Memory.”

After the icy wilderness, Here and Nowhere Else is a sort of Holocene for Baldi, who jokes – yes, jokes – that its cover, which looks like an early dawn snapshot of some autumnal European asylum, signals cheerier horizons than its predecessor’s monochrome lighthouse: “There are some browns in there, you know? It’s not just black and white.” He laughs. “I hate to say the record’s more positive – that's just the word in the press release – but that's all I can say. It's a more positive version of the same things I'm always thinking about.”

Like what? “I’m still vaguely on that weird angst tip,” he answers, shuffling slightly. “I don't know if I'll ever really get over that. But,” he adds quickly, “the lyrics aren't even important. That's not even where I figure out what I'm thinking about. It's not so much that I'm thinking about certain things – it's more that I'm obsessed with songwriting. I have to think about that all the time.”

It’s not until Baldi waxes musical that you get a feel for him. Dark-souled but light-hearted, distracted but determined, he is hugely self-assured and, admittedly, maybe a little geeky. I mention that his “weird angst tip” comment sounds uncharacteristically apologetic, like a Cloud Nothings skeptic’s description of Cloud Nothings. He responds that he was “being slightly self-deprecating; I’m not always angsty but the music expresses, essentially, just that for a lot of the time. Earlier you said I'm quite chatty, which is crazy because I am. I can talk to people. I’m just a normal person, in that sense. I talk to people, you know? I’m not weird. But people expect me to act a certain way because of the music. I guess I don't like when people assume that.”

Maybe song titles like Psychic Trauma don’t help, though in a way, he’s as contradictory and uncertain as a punk in post-postpunk times ought to be. Minutes after assuring that he’s shaken angst (“not like I’m some old wise man now, but I just don’t feel that way anymore”), his chirpy tone swerves onto the subject of low moods and crippling perfectionism; later, Baldi concludes that his music is to “help me figure out who I am,” admitting “I'm kind of talking to myself, more than anybody, in these songs.”

It buttresses his image as an outsider broken-in, a man whose idea of cool is always his own. Since growing up in Cleveland, barren postpunk home of Devo and Pere Ubu, Baldi has emerged from a scene offering little precedent for success. “My dad had a classic rock, Creedence Clearwater Revival type band that he played in,” he recalls of his Cleveland youth. “I thought that was cool, you know, because he was having fun. I'd go see him in bars occasionally. Actually, he wasn't even in the band anymore at that point, because I was born. He had to quit that. But he would sometimes play with them, and I'd go along and be like”–a nasal squeal emerges – “‘That’s my dad!’ I was like, Hey, maybe I'll try to do that.”

With getaway prospects few and far between – Baldi’s favourite pasttime was visiting lighthouses and staring out to sea – songwriting soon became his escape hatch from a bad romance with education. Asked what aspect of college he disliked, the dropout offers, “Uh, everything?” but he was more disillusioned than desperate.

“There was nothing alienating, necessarily, but it definitely felt like it wasn't for me. And it felt like, looking around, it wasn't for a lot of other people either. And that was the part that really bothered me. I was like, 'Why are all these people doing stuff they hate? I've gotta get out of here before I end up going crazy or becoming a drug addict.'” He pauses, thinking. “You know, most people think you join a band to become a drug addict, but I would've stayed in college and done that.” Was that genuinely his future? “I really had no idea. I think that was the thing. I did not see a future for me if I stayed there.”

For all the existential uncertainty and despite his impulse to constantly uproot, you sense Baldi has, in a spiritual sense, settled at last. Does he regret anything? “I feel alright, you know? I know a lot of people who went to college who are a lot stupider than me.” He pauses for effect, laughing broadly this time. “Once in a while we'll have a really dark show, where we're bad or something. And I ask myself, 'Why did I do this?' But for the most part, it's great. It's actually just what I've wanted since I was 10 and saw my dad play at this thing. It's surreal, but it's a lot better than anything else I would be doing. It's the best thing I could be doing right now. For now, everything’s fine. I woke up today and had some coffee, made some eggs. Feeling good.”