Duster

Duster’s 1998 debut album, Stratosphere, is a work of raw beauty, its winding guitar sketches evoking the vulnerable sensation of standing in a wide-open place under a sky full of stars. The slowcore trio’s music is hard to forget, and yet it was once on the verge of slipping out of cultural memory entirely. The group formed in San Jose, CA, in 1996 and disbanded in 2001 after releasing two albums and an EP. Those recordings were scarce on streaming and physical copies rare, but the music spread by word of mouth, gradually enchanting a new audience. Younger musicians such as Girlpool claimed Duster as an influence. It became clear that Clay Parton, Canaan Dove Amber, and Jason Albertini were more than just remembered; they were loved. In 2019, they reunited and released a self-titled album. Their return and ascent to indie-legend status now feels kind of inevitable. Their kind of music will always be found by that part of every generation that feels lost in space.