Slow Fiction – satellite
NYC quintet Slow Fiction have announced their debut album dollhouse, out August 7th on Tight Knit, and “satellite” is the second single, following May’s “junior year.” The band self-produced the record and brought in Sonny DiPerri (DIIV, Julie) to mix, working across a Brooklyn rehearsal space, an upstate New York retreat, and a studio north of San Francisco over several months.
“Satellite” has a hazy, jangle-pop pull to it, Julia Vassallo singing low and worn-in over guitars that stay fuzzy without ever losing shape. The subject underneath that haze is sharper than the sound suggests. Vassallo describes it as an allegory for the country’s drift into us-versus-them thinking, and the specific image she’s working from is concrete: “I was thinking of a person watching something uncomfortable on TV, and then being like ‘oh, that’s too much, I have to turn it off,’ because as a whole we’ve become selective with our empathy.” That’s the kind of detail that makes a song about something as broad as collective disconnection actually land, rather than reading as commentary from a distance.
dollhouse runs eleven songs built around identity as something that’s always on display now, the blur between introspection and surveillance. The band has talked about working like a family, revisiting songs over time rather than rushing them to tape, and you can hear that patience in how settled “satellite” feels even at its haziest. The video is self-directed and built around skate footage, which fits the song’s loose, unhurried momentum.
