Small Studio Saturday: The Drin Recorded 23 Songs in an Attic, and the Double Album Sounds Like It Escaped

A 23-track double album is usually a statement of budget or ego. The Drin’s came out of an attic. I Lost My Way for Centuries, out September 18, runs roughly 75 minutes, and the credits on its Bandcamp page are almost aggressively domestic: “Recorded in the attic in the village and engineered by The Drin,” with one track cut at “Cole’s place,” mastering by Matthew J Barnhart, and cover art by Thomas Wagster. The Cincinnati band is Eric Dietrich, Dylan McCartney, Dakota Carlyle, Ryan Sennett, Luke Cornett, and Cole Gilfilen, and the instrument list reads like a dare: bouzouki, 12-string acoustic, tenor and alto saxophone, aerophone, harmonica, synthesizers, and a lot of electric guitar.

The Drin started as a solo project of Dylan McCartney, who also plays in The Serfs, Motorbike, and Crime of Passing. Treble’s Jeff Terich traces the growth from the compact, roughly 30-minute records of the early years to this one, calling it “The Drin’s boldest statement to date” and pointing to Amon Düül and Spacemen 3 as its cosmic reference points. Bandcamp Daily, which named it Album of the Day on September 22, frames it as McCartney branching out with “an off-kilter spin on gothic Americana, presented through a Spacemen 3-esque filter,” then rattles through the range: “Cannery Action” is a driving art-punk vignette helped by bluesy alto saxophone, “Switched on Solar Lightning” sets itself to the heartbeat of Neu! 2, and “Spent” is “essentially a dub plate played live with a chemtrail coming off of it.”

What keeps 75 minutes from becoming a slog is that the record doesn’t stay put. Martin Douglas’ Bandcamp Daily review hears everything from the garage rock and Madchester backbeat of “That Kind of Water” to the outlaw-country cool of “Take This and Don’t Forget,” while The Fire Note’s Thomas Wilde calls it “a fantastic put-on-your-headphones album where you can just let the grooves take over.” The lyrics carry the same weight of decay as the sound. On “It Will Call Me in Some Time,” McCartney sings, “I will trade my effigies for one more day on Earth,” a line Douglas reads as particularly fitting for our doomscrolling moment.

The release also says something about where a record like this can live. It came out on Feel It Records, an independent label and record shop based in Cincinnati that Sam Richardson started in 2010 as an extension of his punk fanzine Got Myself. Bandcamp Daily’s 2024 profile of the label describes an operation that began as a “hobby label” with a regional focus, run by a founder who says he still handles “a lot of the layout and printing myself.” A double LP is not the easy thing for a label that size to make, and Douglas calls it the band’s “most sprawling opus yet, but also their most palatable.” That combination – ambition without a big-label safety net, and a record that rewards the long listen instead of the skip button – is exactly what this column is for.

Hero image: “I Lost My Way for Centuries” album cover art, The Drin. Used under fair use for editorial commentary.