The three songwriters who make up Casual Technicians might live geographically distant from one another, but it will take a lot more than mileage to keep them apart. Tyler Keene, Boone Howard and Nathan Baumgartner first met in the Oregon music scene, with Baumgartner and Keene founding indie rock outfit And And And and Howard acts like The We Shared Milk and the Boone Howard band, though soon found themselves spreading out across the country. With Baumgartner living on the Oregon coast and Keene on the opposite coast in Newark, New Jersey, they could hardly be further apart if they tried. But undeterred they travelled to Howard’s farm in Chittenango, NY to write, record and keep Casual Technicians alive.
The arrangement might not be typical for an indie rock band, but then there’s little typical about Casual Technicians. “[A] playful sound that’s not only willing to experiment between genres but to meld them together seamlessly,” was how we described their work back in 2023, and their self-titled album—released earlier this year on Repeating Cloud—was a grab bag of idiosyncratic songs. Be it oddball lo-fi pop on songs like ‘Lucy in the Dark’, or swampy acoustic tones on ‘Homecoming’. “It’s just as strange, but in a different way,” as we wrote of the latter in March, “possessing a homebrew folk style that centres around the signature deadpan delivery.”
Not wasting any time, Casual Technicians are now preparing to put out their second album of the year, Deeply Unworthy. To again be released by Repeating Cloud, the record sees the three songwriters cross the beams of their creativity once more and embrace the loveable strangeness of the result. The label cites Steely Dan, Smile-era Beach Boys, Angelo Badalamenti and David Lynch as touchstones, though to try to tame the sound which such references kind of feels besides the point. Better instead to dive right in with latest single ‘Midnight Moon’, another off-kilter folk song which catches the ache and yearn of a lonesome night under the stars. It clocks in at less than two minutes but manages to evoke a small world with its own history attached.
