NYC quintet Slow Fiction have officially arrived with dollhouse, their anticipated debut LP, out today via Tight Knit. Self-produced by the band and mixed by Sonny DiPerri (DIIV, Julie), the 11-track album finds the rising group turning everyday life into something stranger, sharper, and more cinematic.
Alongside the album comes “ninetynine,” a propulsive post-punk cut built on urgent drums and dynamic guitars. The song takes aim at the mundane moments we inevitably inflate in our own heads—like watching someone walk into a bar, then retelling the scene to a friend as if it were a pivotal moment in a movie.
“In some ways, we all romanticize our lives to the point of being a little Truman Show about it,” singer Julia Vassallo explains. “It turns out the camera is usually in your own hands.”
That idea runs throughout dollhouse. The record plays with identity, surveillance, introspection, and the strange gap between who we are alone and who we become when we’re being watched—by other people, by the internet, or simply by ourselves. There’s plenty of tension, but also a sense of play and a willingness to embrace uncertainty.
Slow Fiction—Vassallo, guitarists Paul Knepple and Joseph Skimmons, bassist Ryan Duffin, and drummer Akiva Henig—built the album by deliberately unlearning the songs they had developed onstage. Fragments, late-night ideas, unfamiliar textures, and happy accidents gradually became the finished record. A pump organ, Mellotron, and vocoder all found their way into the mix, while self-production became, in Knepple’s words, “another layer of the songwriting.”
The result is an album that refuses to pin itself down. dollhouse feels less like a definitive statement than a mirror, reflecting the messy business of growing into yourself—and leaving plenty of room for the listener to decide what they see.
Slow Fiction will celebrate dollhouse with a release show at Brooklyn’s TV Eye this Saturday, August 8, presented by Antics Magazine, before heading out on tour supporting Swervedriver.
Slow Fiction Tour Dates:
08/08 – Brooklyn, NY – TV Eye (dollhouse LP release show)
08/18 – Cambridge, MA – The Sinclair *
08/19 – Montreal, QC – Bar le Ritz *
08/20 – Ottawa, ON – The Bronson *
08/21 – Toronto, ON – Phoenix Concert Theatre *
08/22 – Detroit, MI – El Club *
08/23 – Chicago, IL – Thalia Hall *
08/25 – Cleveland, OH – Grog Shop *
08/26 – Washington, DC – The Atlantis *
08/27 – Philadelphia, PA – Underground Arts *
08/28 – Jersey City, NJ – White Eagle Hall *
08/29 – Brooklyn, NY – Music Hall of Williamsburg *
* w/ Swervedriver
