Dalmatian
Shallowater Interview
by Joseph McCain
10 April 2026
Blake, singer and guitarist
Tristan, bassist
Who gets the aux when you guys are hanging out?
Me. I love putting people on. I love finding new music. I'm always scrolling Pitchfork or Rate Your Music.
Most of the coolest shit I've heard, Tristan showed me.
Recently, when I get the aux, I’ve been punishing everyone with black metal.
Who said, “Let's start a band,” first?
I don't know. We were in Austin, way back in the day, and we were lying to everybody about being in a band. And then, Chris and I were like, we should actually do it.
There were a bunch of us, but he and I were the only people who showed up for the first practice. There were like eight of us, thank God we didn't all show up.
How often do you listen to your own music?
It's hard to say. Unreleased stuff, I feel like I'm constantly listening to it to make sure it's what I want. I’ve only just now been able to listen to our first record and get any kind of enjoyment out of it.
Whenever it first came out, I was listening to it with some neurotic thinking like, “Okay, it's out now. Is it actually good?” But now that it's been out for a while, I can let it just sit there.
For a band, releasing two full-length projects in two years is pretty rare. How often do you guys write?
Hardly ever, we had stacked that all up. Most of the second record was finished before the first, but the first was written over probably two to three years of jamming during COVID.
And one of those songs Blake wrote when he was around 15. Pretty much the whole first record was already there, and it took a whole year to record it. So we had a lot of time, and we had already progressed past the point where we wanted to be, musically. Half of a Million Dollars had already been written by that time; we were playing some of those songs at our album release show for the first record.
This time around, though, we're hitting the ground writing. We've been writing since around December, so it's been a new process, because we're coming up with stuff as we go now instead of having things in the chamber.
We've been able to go at our own pace, but we have to write a third record now. We’re thinking, what does that even look like? We don't have a year to just jam on an instrumental before practice until it becomes a song. Intentionally writing is a new thing for us.
Do you prefer how you used to do it?
I find this to be a good challenge. I would like to, in general, in life, be more active in songwriting, and I think this is making us do it.
Yeah, I think it's just the natural progression of things. Because Shallowater has already gotten way further ahead than we ever thought. We didn't think we'd even get a second album. So we like doing this, and if we want to continue doing this, we're gonna have to be good at just writing songs.
Your songs are pretty long. That's rare these days. Is that just how you naturally came to writing songs?
It was a product of the way we were writing, spending so much time that you'd end up with all these riffs, and then slowly, you see how they could all connect. We’d be working on a little three-minute piece, but then get a new riff and wonder if we can make it go into that, and we could. After the first two, it did become an intentional thing.
We were all comfortable with the idea of making a long song, so we found it fun.
It was definitely intentional by the end of it. It's also a kind of challenge to do that and make it interesting the whole time because it's really easy to fall into the trap of making it long just for the sake of it. You have to earn it.
I really want to figure out how to make a song that's like three minutes.
Yeah, three-minute song, and it does the same thing. That would be awesome. Maybe we should just play faster.
You guys sound so full in a way that's hard to accomplish with a three-piece. Is that another thing that you guys are conscious of?
Tristan is everywhere on his bass playing. He's playing up high sometimes, he's playing down low sometimes. That fills in a lot of space that in a lot of bands is taken over by a second guitar. His bass playing acts like a second guitar in a lot of cases.
When I was first learning, our friend Hayden Pedigo came over, and he was playing in an open tuning. I couldn't do the math in my head on how to play in standard to that, so I asked him what notes he was in, and I open-tuned my bass. I found that I could do a lot of really cool stuff with that and play chords and use my harmonics in a way that I couldn't on standard. I can play a bass note and then hit harmonics, and it sounds like feedback coming through whenever we have distortion on. It can fill two roles. We tried getting a fourth member a handful of times, but we realized that if I wanted to continue playing the way I play, I wouldn't be able to.
Another thing about the open tunings is, it allows me to, even when I'm doing more leady stuff, because it's open tuning, I'm able to hit all the strings at once. So there's never really a thinning of the guitar.
Any shows soon?
We're headlining at nightclub 101, June 20, and everyone needs to buy tickets to that, because it’s gonna be a lot of fun. We get to play for an hour. Finally, we never get to do that.
Do you have something special planned?
Yeah, we're gonna do some crazy covers. We're gonna bring the Creed cover back.
Bringing back some old songs we never play.
We're playing some songs we haven't played in around two years. In order for us to get our point across, we need that amount of time, and we never get to do that. So if you're in New York on June 20, you get to experience it.
Shallowater on Instagram
God’s Gonna Give You a Million Dollars on Spotify and Apple Music.