SPOTLIGHT: Slow Fiction Get Philosophical on Debut Album ‘dollhouse’
SPOTLIGHT
SPOTLIGHT
☆ BY ALEAH ANTONIO ☆
Photo by Jimmy Quinn
“IT’S REALLY THE DIFFERENT WAYS THAT WE CAN LOOK AT THE SAME SCENARIO—The way that we’re acting, the way somebody else is viewing us acting, and why it feels like acting at all sometimes and not just being.” Julia Vassallo calls me from a park after her morning in Brooklyn with her bandmate, Ryan Duffin. Their band Slow Fiction’s debut album dollhouse, out today, is full of vantage points. Vassallo explains that, like a dollhouse, there are different rooms of the same house that you can zoom out of and look at all at once. The album was named after its titular track—a name that Vassallo says perfectly captured the ethos of the record.
“The mask that a lot of people tend to wear, when that comes down… does it still say something about us, even when we’re performing, what we’re revealing to other people through that performance? We all do it in quite a different way,” Vassallo says.
dollhouse wastes no time getting to the point. “junior year,” the album opener, surveys perception and performance. The song asks, “who are you? / When no one’s looking back or through?” Whether on stage or off, Slow Fiction surveys the difference between their outward face and their true selves, and whether those two are one in the same.
The band, completed with Akiva Henig, Paul Knepple and Joe Skimmons, formed in 2021. Musicians in New York were excited to make music following the pandemic, and many of them eventually became a part of the city’s new wave of alternative rock bands. Slow Fiction has since released two EPs, 2022’s self titled and 2024’s Crush, with a handful of singles. Now, Vassallo and Duffin explain their band dynamic as a progression from friends to family.
“That’s the coolest thing—less how it was when we met, but more how we have been along the way,” Vassallo says.
The band created dollhouse in two phases. The first was their writing session in upstate New York during the winter of 2025. Most, if not all, songs on the record came out of one week of being together. Then they traveled to a quiet place near San Francisco’s Stinson Beach to finish the record before going to Sonny DiPerri’s home studio in L.A. for final mixing.
“We spent the first couple days getting our bearings. In some ways, there was a little bit of frustration. It felt like there was a little bit of pressure. Then one night we were listening to playback on the song ‘what the night told me,’ and it was the first song where we really started to see the song emerge,” Duffin says. “Before [the album] was done, there was a lot of trepidation around hoping that it would work out. Now that it’s here, I feel very relieved to feel as proud about the way that it’s turned out.”
dollhouse leans into a wispier shoegaze sound with soft melodic spaces to breathe, inspired by Yo La Tengo, Cocteau Twins and Broken Social Scene’s You Forgot It In People. Tracks “idle hours” and “g.a.l.s.” stretch out their arms with a melancholic honesty. Both are about the push and pull of vulnerability with someone else. “You could be really physically far apart from somebody and feel very close to them; conversely, you can be right next to somebody and feel like they’re a stranger to you,” Vassallo says.
The album’s climax, “turning down flowers,” is a six-minute epic about the toils of womanhood—what a woman is without anyone to look at her; the strength that could exude if everyone’s voices fell apart. The record is full of aphorisms and wordplay. The beauty of dollhouse is that now that it’s out of Slow Fiction’s hands, whatever meaning the listener takes from the record belongs to them.
“It’s a completely separate experience… people receiving [the music] will have their own relationship to it that has nothing to do with us, in some ways,” Vassallo says.
Later this month, Slow Fiction opens for Swervedriver to open their Raise 35th anniversary tour with The Life and Times and The Still Out.
“It’s a treat to be able to play shows especially with a band who has such an awesome legacy, and has been really inspirational to so many younger bands nowadays, ourselves included,” Vassallo says. “They’re celebrating 35 years of [Raise], and I think that is such an aspiration to put out a piece of work like that. This time has passed, but there’s some staying power and there’s still so much to appreciate about it.”
Photo by Jimmy Quinn
