PRE-ORDER: Dirt Buyer - 'Dirt Buyer III'

Dirt Buyer III begins with a song about sports. “Baseball/ Is somethin’/ I’ll never get, but I/ Sleep on it/ Wake up/ And try again,” Joe Sutkowski coos over loping-then-roaring distorted guitar. But of course, anyone familiar with the emotional depths of Dirt Buyer’s music knows Sutkowski isn’t simply singing about America’s favorite pastime. “It’s about growing up with certain expectations and adhering to them for no reason other than doing what you’re told,” Sutkowski explains. “The song is about gaining autonomy and independence.” In its opening moments, Dirt Buyer III goes back to origin stories, to disconnects hard-wired in childhood, to set up an album that, from there, is a visceral document of navigating the same trials in adulthood.

When Dirt Buyer II arrived in 2023, it had already been sitting on the shelf for three years. By then, all the songs had been written for Dirt Buyer III, pouring out of Sutkowski during a particularly tumultuous stretch of life. Where in the past he would write the amount of songs necessary for an album and head right into the studio, here he had amassed more than two dozen tracks. Mere weeks after II found its way into the world, Sutkowski was recording III. “I was so ready to do something else,” he explains. He was ready to put these years behind him.

In the same way there was a sonic leap from the homemade recordings of Dirt Buyer to the moderate studio polish of Dirt Buyer II, Sutkowski’s music has again undergone a logical but substantial evolution between albums. The bones are the same: ragged acoustic guitars, electric riffs chiming autumnally then caustic and overdriven, drums staggering forward with the same desperate pace with which Sutkowski passed through these years. Then, his voice above it all: plaintive, weaving, breaking at times and finding new power in others. Buoyed by the bulletproof structures of these songs and more muscular production, Dirt Buyer III presents the fullest, most immersive version of Sutkowski’s sound yet.

In October of 2023, Sutkowski joined his friends Hayden Ticehurst and Chris Cubeta at Brooklyn’s Studio G. He showed them all the demos, and together the trio culled it down to the “heaviest hitters of the bunch,” narrowing in on the 11 compositions featured on III. “We knew what the songs were going to be, and we tackled everything head on,” Sutkowski says. Still, they took their time getting everything just right, with recording, mixing, and finishing touches scattered across a year. As a result, Sutkowski has never been more proud of a Dirt Buyer album, adding: ““The finished product is the best representation of where I’m at now as a songwriter..”

Dirt Buyer songs can often reflect on the past and present simultaneously. In most cases, Dirt Buyer III’s material is raw, in-the-moment transmissions from a fraught passage. Nearing the end of his twenties, Sutkowski found himself battling alcoholism while grappling with relationship strife and family trauma. He holed up in his bedroom, writing song after song at his desk. The songs became a way of communicating when he struggled to find the words in conversation.

“There was all this shit happening at the same time,” Sutkowski recalls. “I didn’t have the language to express things I needed to in order to protect myself dealing with this new open relationship dynamic at the peak of my alcoholism.” While years of intensive therapy have since brought Sutkowski to a better place and given him new perspective on his experience, the songs on Dirt Buyer III still exist in the headspace from that time period.

If everything in waking life was chaotic, Sutkowski’s art gravitated towards form, as if to wrest control wherever he could. As III’s songs arrived, Sutkowski worked fast and furious, honing in on straightforward, sturdy verse-chorus structures. “I tapped into this thing and just tried to milk it for all I could,” he explains. While still favoring the intersection of grunge, emo, and folk that has defined the scuzzy, vulnerable music of Dirt Buyer’s past, Dirt Buyer III is the product of Sutkowski hammering away again and again, refining these songs into the purest distillation of his work yet.

That’s never more obvious than on “Get To Choose,” a ridiculously catchy pop-punk banger that would’ve been a major hit in the heyday of Fuse some twenty years ago. Yet while the sugary energy of its earworm chorus could be mistaken for euphoria, the song derives from one of Sutkowski’s lowest lows. “Multizeal” and the softer “Betchu Won’t,” are songs shot through with desperation from when Sutkowski felt trapped in his own life just begging for something to change. “I never wanna / Cry again / But I can cry again / This time and maybe / We’ll get it right.” Sutkowski sings.

Across Dirt Buyer III, Sutkowski attacks different emotions and travails from all angles. Like “Wait On The World,” the haunting tumble of “For Me” looks at toxic cycles and wishes for an escape, this time from addiction. The gorgeous, ghostly “Halfway” wrestles with suicidal ideation. Eventually, Sutkowski’s process of healing pokes through, but in all the messiness that comes with that, too: “Bullshit Fuck” is a vicious piece of guttural shoegaze capturing the “angry” stage of therapy.

Though these songs might scan as cathartic, they occur in the space in which they were born. They are living documents of the years that almost killed Sutkowski. “Getting better was a very, very slow-moving process,” he admits now. “I had a big old bucket of shit I had to sift through across a ton of therapy, self-reflection, and journaling.”

If redemption or resolution are glimpsed, it’s in album closer “When You Were A Kid.” There, on the other side of the album, Sutkowski circles back to the same childhood depicted in “Baseball.” Now, “When You Were A Kid” is a gentle series of fragile, precious memories — a different view on the roots we need to untangle as we get older. Then, three minutes in, the song launches into the most violent, intense musical moment of the whole album, Sutkowski howling and trembling over guitars thrown deep into the red. It sounds like an outburst as purge, finally burning away all that preceded it.

It was only with hindsight that Sutkowski could hear it that way, that he could frame these experiences. “These songs are from the most difficult time of my life,” he concludes. “I did so much work on myself, and now I can talk about it all because I’m still here.”