Alone With Everyone puts shoegazers Doubledrag on the map

Photo Courtesy of Doubledrag

Seismologists have data on how regularly local shoegaze band Doubledrag have served as an epicenter for tsunamis of noise. Chances are good you’ve encountered their members in innumerable regional acts over the years, but their legacy is currently being cemented by their most recent LP, Alone With Everyone—an eight-song collective that works like gangbusters both in sequence while listening at home, or preferably, blasted into your face from five feet away at one of the area’s more intimate hardcore venues. 

If you aren’t familiar, you may know some of the guys’ earlier endeavors, like the emo project The Author and the Illustrator or indie rock group Scouts. Or, maybe you know them as the faces behind local guitar repair and service shops Fountain City Guitarworks and Seuf Guitars. Yes, these guys really know how to make sense of some strings.

After stints with other small-time locals and talks of constructing a shoegaze band, Doubledrag was formed in 2016—an eight-years-and-running project that resulted in their very first album earlier in 2024. The group consists of brothers Mark and Shaun Penechar on vocals and guitars, vocalist and guitarist Ian Dobyns, and drummer Mac Bowes.

Last March, their almost decade-worth of collective work has come to fruition as their record Alone With Everyone dropped, followed by an album release show at recordBar, where they played the entire record after openers siilk and Wire Twins.

The group experimented with their live sound by having their friend Mason Nagy join them on bass for the show. A permanent low-end axe-slinger brought the entire sonic spectrum into sync. 

They took their exploratory measures a step further when Bowes timed out and built an entire lighting rig to create a new experience for Doubledrag concert-goers. They were a bit nervous about the outcome.

“Whenever you put this much effort into a record, which none of us had ever done before, you think, what else exists at a live show that blows people away?” Dobyns says. “A real light show,  real interludes, and a way for us to not feel like we have to address the crowd between songs. A lot of prep went into doing that show at recordBar—timing stuff out, making time code for a lighting rig that none of us knew anything about doing up until this point, and really trying to develop something that looked cool onstage—something that we would have wanted to see.”

Alone With Everyone is unlike any of the artists’ previous work. It was their first time actually doing studio work, having recorded everything previous in Dobyns’ basement, including doing a track at a friend’s house that was later mixed in his basement. The DIY approach has now evolved to work at multiple KC studios for album aspirations.

“Josh Garber, who produced the record, has a project studio in the back of the Plug Your Holes building in the Crossroads, off of 18th,” Dobyns says. “We did the entire record there, from start to finish.”

Photo Courtesy of Doubledrag

“It took us about six weeks in total,” Mark says. “The first two weeks, we would go in and pick the song and essentially lock ourselves in a room until we had it fleshed out. The rest of it was tracking. So, about six weeks.”

Bowes was away with another band he did work for on-and-off during the three-month album period, barely spending any time at home while back in KC to help record.

“It was just going to the studio at night, working my day job when I’m home, and then go back on the road for another month after that,” Bowes says. “It was fast for me, but I was not there for vocals and mixing. I was on the road when I was getting the tracks bounced back to me, hearing them in the middle of Canada, and trying to give my revision notes.”

When asked what songs they were the most proud of off the release, Dobyns immediately jumped to “Seed”—a track on the back half of the record that guides those to “leave complacency behind.”

“During pre-production, while we were trying to write out the songs, ‘Seed’ was one of the hardest to put together,” Dobyns says. “We would lock ourselves in a room until a song had a structure and we could play through it, and we were in the room for about five hours. It was a long time to sit there. All of us wanted to leave it and none of us wanted to be in the room anymore.”

“‘Call’ is my personal favorite off the record,” Mark says. “I think that one we wrote in the room start-to-finish, after sitting there and discussing what we wanted to do. I think we had that one nailed down in 45 minutes or an hour, and it did not really change from there.”

At times, things crumbled underneath them, forcing them to throw away ideas completely and start from scratch while already knee-deep into them, such as on “Sound.”

“Mac and I switched instruments to write it,” Dobyns says. “The ideas were gone. The inspiration was gone and something had to change.”

The first step in the process was not to turn to the giants of the genre, like My Bloody Valentine or Slowdive, but instead to reinvent their own sound, turning the washed-out guitar noise into something they could call their own.

Photo Courtesy of Doubledrag

“I think we kind of focused on not using a washed-out sound as a crutch, because we were doing that for a really long time,” Mark says. “I think stepping back from that actually got us the sound that we found on that record, for better or worse, probably for better.”

“I think it would have been too copy-and-paste from a lot of our influences to do that and take a direct copy of what we like to listen to,” Bowes says. “I think it was way more of a challenge to ourselves to make something reminiscent of what we love and what we want to do, but not use all of the effects and all of the tricks of the trade that Slowdive and My Bloody Valentine do.”

With a number of shows already under their belt, Dobyns tells us the group absolutely loves volume—the wall of sound it creates and the body high you get from being fully immersed in anything.

“Looking back on the shows before we did the record, there was always this hint of ‘I just want to sound better,’” Dobyns says. “I did not know what needed to change. That was part of the reason, at least for me, I wanted to work with somebody else, work with somebody that was going to reign us in and teach us how to be who we are—big and loud and aggressive.”

Their large, looming, ballistic nature will be on display at The Bottleneck’s Not So Silent Night on Saturday, Dec. 21, playing as part of a seven-band bill with Cauterized, When Forever Finds Me, Lovely Burden, Fritsy, Left on Red, and My Escape.