There’s something deliciously unsettling about watching yourself get watched — and that’s exactly the headspace NYC five-piece Slow Fiction are living in right now. Hot off supporting Wet Leg and Vundabar across the Northeast, the band has announced their debut full-length, ‘dollhouse’, landing August 7th via the brand-new indie label Tight Knit. Alongside the news comes a shimmering, slow-burn new single called satellite — and it’s the kind of song that sneaks up on you before it floors you.
The Sound of Looking Away
satellite isn’t just a pretty wash of guitars (though it’s that too). Singer Julia Vassallo frames the track as a meditation on emotional avoidance in a culture that’s gone all-in on Us vs. Them thinking.
“‘satellite’ is an allegory for collective atrophy in a country that’s poisoned with an Us vs. Them mentality. I was thinking of a person watching something uncomfortable on TV, and then being like ‘oh, that’s too much, I have to turn it off,’ because as a whole we’ve become selective with our empathy. I heard someone say recently that the price of community is occasional inconvenience; we’ve got to start considering community as more than just our own digital echo chambers.”
The accompanying video, self-directed by the band, is stitched together from skate footage shot by Crossy, Daniel Snyder, Val Henderson, Adam Burns, Nick Demos, and Enchi Wang — giving the song’s themes of motion and observation a literal, concrete-scraped visual language.
Identity, Under Glass
‘dollhouse’ takes its title seriously. Across 11 tracks, the album frames identity as something simultaneously private and performed — a little world you think is your own until you remember someone’s always peering in. That tension between surveillance and introspection runs through the whole record, probing who we are alone versus who we become once we’re seen, whether by other people, the internet, or our own inner critic.
Opener junior year sets the tone immediately, with Vassallo asking the record’s central question over quizzical bass and refracting guitar: who are you when no one’s looking back, or looking through? It’s a big question wrapped in propulsive, catharsis-built rock — the kind of song that makes you want to drive too fast and think too hard at the same time.
Built Like a Family, Recorded Like One Too
If you’ve ever lived in New York, you know the city has a way of turning friendships into something closer to chosen family — and that’s exactly the dynamic that’s shaped Slow Fiction over the last five years. Duffin, Knepple, and Skimmons share a place; Henig and Vassallo are just down the block. That proximity isn’t incidental — it’s foundational.
“We are a family and we work on our music like that. Everyone is part of the organism.”
That trust gave the band room to let songs breathe and evolve rather than locking them down too early.
“You have to live with the song a little bit.”
Recording kicked off in August 2025 and wrapped with final mixes in January, with Sonny DiPerri (DIIV, Julie) behind the board. The band tracked across a genuinely eclectic string of locations — a cramped Brooklyn rehearsal space, a snowy upstate retreat, and an ocean-facing studio north of San Francisco — letting each environment leave its fingerprints on the songs. Vintage gear became part of the songwriting process itself: a pump organ, a Mellotron, a vocoder, all woven in simply because they were within reach. Self-producing, as guitarist Joseph Skimmons puts it, became “another layer of the songwriting.”
A Mirror, Not a Manifesto
Rather than re-recording the road-tested versions of songs that had already taken shape on tour, the band deliberately unlearned them — letting fragments and half-formed late-night lyrics stay unresolved until the studio revealed what they were actually about. The result is an album that resists a single fixed meaning. ‘dollhouse’ isn’t trying to tell you what it’s about — it’s handing you a mirror and seeing what you bring to it.
‘dollhouse’ track list
- junior year
- ninetynine
- mouthpiece
- what the night told me
- bottle episode
- idle hours
- g.a.l.s.
- dollhouse
- satellite
- heavy metal
- turning down flowers
Pre-order ‘dollhouse’ HERE.
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