Dirty Projectors

An eclectic indie rock act from New York, Dirty Projectors are a band of contradictions. Creating music that is at once challenging and accessible, Dirty Projectors' recordings are full of engaging melodies, thoughtful arrangements, and polished harmonies punctuated with angular stylistic shifts, wiry guitar work, and lyrics whose themes sometimes run counter to the sounds they accompany. The brainchild of vocalist, songwriter, and instrumentalist Dave Longstreth, Dirty Projectors was an extension of his solo work, making their debut in 2002. The project first caught the attention of indie rock followers with 2004's Slaves' Graves and Ballads, and 2009's Bitte Orca was a critical and popular breakthrough that exposed their work to a larger audience. In 2010 they collaborated with Björk on Mount Wittenberg Orca. 2017's Dirty Projectors was a darker, electronically oriented work that was created in the wake of a difficult romantic breakup; they returned to a more familiar brand of eccentric pop with R&B and electronic influences on 2018's Lamp Lit Prose, while 2020's 5EPS compiled a series of EPs that presented the group in particularly collaborative form. 2025's Song of the Earth was an ambitious song cycle dealing with environmental issues which Longstreth composed and performed with Dirty Projectors and the German chamber ensemble Stargaze. Dirty Projectors are the creation of Dave Longstreth, a former Yale student who left college to become one of the most prolific and unique indie singer/songwriters of the early 2000s. In 2002, Longstreth released his first album, The Graceful Fallen Mango, under his own name on the This Heart Plays Records imprint. Largely recorded on four-track with the help of friends in like-minded projects such as Wolf Colonel and Dear Nora, the album introduced Longstreth's distinctive crooning voice and equally unique approach to arrangements, and both lo-fi and hi-fi production. As he continued to record, Longstreth played shows with contemporaries like the Microphones, Bobby Birdman, and [[[[VVRSSNN]]]] (aka Yume Bitsu's Adam Forkner). Forkner helped record his next album, The Glad Fact, which was the first to bear the Dirty Projectors name and arrived on Western Vinyl in fall 2003. This was quickly followed by Morning Better Last!, an effort culled from three triple albums he'd recorded in 2001 and 2002; it was an Internet-only release on States Rights. Slaves' Graves & Ballads, which Longstreth described as "a song-journey for me singing with a ten-piece chamber group called the Orchestral Society for the Preservation of the Orchestra," arrived in early 2004 as a split release on Western Vinyl and Happy Happy Birthday to Me Records. The 2005 album The Getty Address was a Don Henley-themed concept album that was followed a year later by the New Attitude EP. Rise Above, from 2007, reinterpreted songs from Black Flag's classic hardcore punk album Damaged, and Bitte Orca appeared in 2009 with some of the band's most accessible songs to date. In 2010 the group collaborated with Björk on Mount Wittenberg Orca, an EP that benefited the National Geographic Society Oceans Project; it was available only digitally for a year, then received a physical release on CD and vinyl in 2011. Their next proper full-length, Swing Lo Magellan, arrived in the summer of 2012. After breaking up with his romantic partner and frequent collaborator Amber Coffman, Longstreth found himself writing songs that dealt with personal issues in a way he had not previously attempted. The songs formed the core of Dirty Projectors' self-titled ninth album, released in February 2017. The band returned with the follow-up, Lamp Lit Prose, a year later. The record featured guest spots from HAIM, Fleet Foxes' Sam Pecknold, and former Vampire Weekend member Rostam, and its release was preceded by the lead single "Break-Thru." In December 2019, Dirty Projectors released Sing the Melody, a live-in-the-studio set that found the touring version of the band performing highlights from the Lamp Lit Prose tour. Along with six songs from the Dirty Projectors' catalog, the album featured "Knotty Pine," which Dave Longstreth wrote in collaboration with David Byrne, and "FourFiveSeconds," the Rihanna/Kanye West/Paul McCartney hit that Longstreth helped write and produce. March 2020 saw the band release an EP, Windows Open, which was the first of five they planned to deliver that year, with each featuring a different creative emphasis and a different member of the band on lead vocals. Dirty Projectors celebrated the ambitious project with 5EPs, issued in November 2020, which collected each members' turn on vocals (Windows Open, Flight Tower, Earth Crisis, Super João, and Ring Road) in one package. In January 2025, Longstreth took part in a concert honoring the late David Berman of the Silver Jews, in which he performed three songs from Berman's songbook. Shortly afterwards, Longstreth recorded a three-song EP, Covers for a Belated Birthday, that included his interpretations of Berman's "Black & Born Blues," "Pet Politics," and "Random Rules," which was made available as a free download via Longstreth's Substack page. In 2022, Longstreth debuted Song of the Earth, a song cycle he created in collaboration with Stargaze, a German chamber orchestra with a focus on contemporary music. The piece was inspired by the music of Gustav Mahler (who composed a piece for voice and orchestra titled Das Lied von der Erde in 1909) and writings on the earth's ongoing environmental crisis by author David Wallace-Wells. Longstreth, Stargaze, and members of Dirty Projectors performed the piece at concert halls in London, Amsterdam, and Los Angeles as the composer revised and refined the work. In April 2025, an official recording of Song of the Earth was released in tandem by Nonesuch Records and New Amsterdam Records, with the music performed by Dirty Projectors and Stargaze and conducted by Andre de Ridder. It was the first Dirty Projectors release after keyboard player Olga Bell returned to the lineup in 2024.
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