Chicago-based indie outfit Dendrons formed back in 2018, initially starting out as an earnest collaboration between two childhood friends, who reconnected as adults, after spending years in different states. The project eventually expanded to a quintet, following the strength of DIY bookings and homemade recordings.
Since the band’s formation, they’ve developed a sound that meshes elements of post-punk, blender pop and noise. Their material frequently moves between worlds; at times, kitschy and intimate, before quickly morphing into maximalism, full of feedback, synths, multipart harmonies and combinations of propulsive drum kids and electronic beat sampling.
The band has supported their first two albums, 2020’s self-titled full-length debut and 2022’s 5-3-8 with extensively touring across the US, Canada, Mexico, Europe and the UK.
The Chicago-based outfit’s third album Indiana is slated for a November 17, 2025 release through Candlepin Records. The album reportedly found the band at a point of reinvention, with the album’s material featuring a refined sonic palette, which drew from a more diverse pool of influences among the band’s members. Songs were demoed, scrapped, rewritten and scrutinized in detail over the course of a two-year period.
Indiana‘s second and latest single “Monsteras” is a tense and urgent song that sees the band alternating between tautened restraint and noisy rock bombast, held together by the song’s relentless motorik-like groove and hushed, almost meditative vocals. Subtly recalling Canadian post punks Blessed, “Monsteras,” manages to evoke the surreal air of our current moment, in which we somehow still go to work and worry about the rent or the mortgage, while the world burns and the US slides into fascism. Nothing to see here. Get back to work, you lazy bum . . . And yet, deep in your soul, you know everything is deeply fucked up, and it’s somehow getting worse.
The accompanying video was shot over the course of a single night in Chicago. Shot in run-and-gun style, the video features elements of stop motion animation throughout. The “Dust Man,” the Sisyphean main character of the video was played by one of the band’s members. In some way, we are all Dust Man, performing absurd, often Sisyphean tasks until we die.
Long live Dust Man.