Macula Dog

Macula Dog’s sophomore album, Orange 2 is their most cohesive and purposeful release to date and marks an exciting new stage for the NYC experimental duo. This new collection melds the hard-hitting dynamics of 2020’s Breezy EP with the bands’ own version of traditional verse-chorus-verse pop songs. 
 Orange 2 was written during the coronavirus lockdown, a stretch of seemingly endless free time that the duo used to fine tune and perfect their new songs. The isolation of quarantine also afforded them a respite from live performance, which they used to break out of old routines and songwriting techniques while experimenting with new processes and equipment. Orange 2 is the band’s attempt to write more straightforward songs, each with a prominent lead vocalist. The vocals, which take Macula Dog’s signature processing and voice manipulation to new extremes, are more prominent in the mix than on past releases but hardly conventional. And while this distillation of their vocal sound might not hit the intended “pop singer” mark, it serves as the backbone of Macula Dog’s best songs thus far. As the band says: 
 “We wanted to make a ‘proper’ record — with 12 pop songs, a distinct, great lead singer, and music you could dance to. Instead we have 10 songs with a singer you can’t understand. We really thought we had made our most accessible album yet until we sat down and listened to the whole thing. This album is a huge failure but may be our best work.”