Belong

Since their inception in 2002, the New Orleans experimental duo Belong—Turk Dietrich and Michael Jones—have methodically broadened their textural sonic palette through gradual and uneven steps. Their first full-length effort, October Language, arrived in 2006 as a defining ambient statement whose thick, shapeless environments arose from submerged strata of guitars, synthesizers, vocals, and assorted sources reduced to near erasure. On the 2011 follow-up Common Era the pair shifted toward conventional song frameworks, a direction they pursued with greater polish in the shoegaze-leaning material of their 2024 third album, Realistic IX.

Guitarist Jones and producer Dietrich, who also performs in Benelli alongside Joshua Eustis of Telefon Tel Aviv, initiated their partnership under the Belong name in 2002 and moved into Dietrich’s home studio two years later. Drawing from the intertwined vitality and deterioration of New Orleans itself, they painstakingly assembled October Language and issued it in early 2006 while the city continued recovering from Hurricane Katrina; their label Carpark Records noted at the time that “October Language might be the only record you’ll hear from New Orleans this year.” After the release they performed across the United States and Europe, supplementing demand for new material with a 2006 Tour EP and two further short releases in 2008—Same Places and the distorted pop of Colorloss Record. A vinyl edition of October Language appeared in 2009 and soon vanished from print, yet the record steadily gained stature within drone, ambient, and experimental communities. Belong resurfaced in 2011 with Common Era on the Kranky imprint, then waited more than a decade before unveiling Realistic IX in 2024, an album that merged composed songs with luminous, abrasive layers while leaning more explicitly on shoegaze aesthetics than prior work.