Slaughter Beach, Dog

Slaughter Beach, Dog fuses intimate lo-fi folk textures with the brooding hues of indie rock under the direction of Jake Ewald, who shares frontman duties in the Philadelphia emo band Modern Baseball. What began as scattered side releases gradually became Ewald’s central focus, allowing him to pursue a gentler and wider-ranging palette than his main group permitted. The first recordings appeared before Modern Baseball entered its hiatus period. After handling nearly all instrumentation and production on the self-titled debut and the 2017 album Birdie, Ewald broadened the project into a full-band configuration that surfaced on Safe and Also No Fear in 2019. Working alone once more, he tracked At the Moonbase at home throughout the worldwide pandemic, steering toward a brighter, pop-oriented approach. That direction carried into the 2023 ensemble release Crying, Laughing, Waving, Smiling, which drew partial inspiration from the classic singer/songwriters of the 1970s.

The project surfaced publicly when “Toronto Mug” appeared on Making New Enemies’ Group Picture, Vol. 4 compilation in 2014. Another track followed in 2015 on the label’s next collection, after which Ewald issued his first 7" EP, Dawg, through his own Family Dinner imprint. While shaping the autobiographical half of Modern Baseball’s Holy Ghost, he began situating new songs in the setting of Slaughter Beach and invented a cast of characters to inhabit them, opening lyrical ground separate from his primary band’s concerns. He signed with Lame-O in 2016 and closed the year with the debut album Welcome, supporting it through solo performances.

Once Modern Baseball paused activities in early 2017, Ewald devoted himself entirely to Slaughter Beach, Dog, increasing his live schedule and collaborating in the studio with bandmate Ian Farmer, the bassist from Modern Baseball. Those sessions yielded the mid-2017 EP Motorcycle.jpg and, shortly afterward, the second album Birdie. By 2019 the lineup had grown into a complete band that recorded the darker, more collective Safe and Also No Fear, released that August.

The group had finished a nationwide tour behind the record when the pandemic arrived in early 2020. Ewald returned to a solo method, relocating from Philadelphia to a house in the Poconos and writing and recording without his bandmates. Issued in December, At the Moonbase reflected further refinement through heightened hi-fi clarity and pop touches such as synths and saxophone supplied by guest Will Schade. An even more isolated effort, the 2022 release Live at the Cabin captured a spare set of earlier songs performed alone at the house. For the fifth album, Ewald rejoined his bandmates to shape a precisely arranged collection influenced by classic songwriters including Randy Newman, Neil Young, and Tom Waits. Crying, Laughing, Waving, Smiling, among the project’s most cohesive statements, arrived in 2023.