Since the release of its 2022 debut album, Summer on a Salt Flat, the indie duo of Rylee Dunn and Tess Condron saw a couple of vocalists come and go, but decided it best to stick it out together.
The result is Blankslate’s second long-play, Lookout Mountain Charley, which will be out on Friday, August 8. To celebrate, the pair is playing a local release show on Thursday, August 7, at Skylark Lounge, with Clementine and Rosebay also on the bill. The gig is also the first opportunity to grab the new record, featuring cover art by William Schaff, on CD.
Dunn and Condron dive into everything that informed Lookout Mountain Charley, from re-solidifying themselves as a duo to writing the ten new tracks. “At a certain point we were like, ‘Okay, we’re going to do whatever we can to make sure that after all this time the final product is exactly what we want it to be,’” says guitarist-vocalist Dunn.
As one of the best indie bands doing it in Denver (the two earned a 2025 Best of Denver award for Best Indie Duo), Blankslate built a loyal local following over the five years since first single, “Westcliff,” hit the airwaves in 2019.
Despite some lineup changes, Condron and Dunn are cool with keeping Blankslate between them at this point.
Courtesy Lillian Fuglei
“It definitely changed things a little bit and made us take stock of things, like, ‘Okay, this isn’t really panning out the way that we thought it was going to be when we were nineteen-year-old kids at DU playing at our storage close like we’re going to be friends forever,’” she adds.
“When you start, you’re so wide-eyed. Everything’s going to work out, and it’s going to be a fairy tale of a band and we’re going to hit it big and it’s going to be great,” Dunn, who also plays bass, continues. “I think that just happens when you’re in your twenties and you’re a local musician, priorities change, and plans change, and things ebb and flow a little bit.”
Some of the songs on Lookout Mountain Charley have been in the hopper for a few years, while others were whipped up fresh just before wrapping up the album, making the latest a sonic time capsule of what Blankslate’s been through up until now.
Condron considers it a full-circle moment, pointing to how she and Dunn found comfort in settling back into what they’ve done all along. “Rylee and I have always been the songwriters of the band. The musical inspiration and additions have always been us and our brains,” explains the drummer and keys player.
“We wrote them a specific way, then whoever was singing at the time, we’d change them to fit with their voice,” Dunn adds. “Then when it was back to the two of us, we were like, ‘Okay, we’re just going to bring it back to the original thing.’ When we first started writing songs it was always just the two of us.”
But with Dunn’s voice featured at the forefront, Blankslate’s indie-folk now hits with more of a Midwest-emo edge. Songs such as “Jonny Greenwood” and “Nov. 16 (Paper Ducks)” are full-on punkish ragers. Then there’s “Lamp Post Hearts” (check out the live at Red Rocks edition from last month, too) and “Idaho” that land more on the bedroom-pop side.
Then somewhere in between lives “Oh, Monolith,” the indie-prog magnum opus that includes an out-of-this-world sound collage made up of audio clips from the Apollo 13 missions and of children pretending to be astronauts.
“We put them through this plug-in that basically takes the GPS location of where you are located and where the moon is at the time that you use the plug-in, and it puts the same amount of delay time as it would for the sound to have traveled from you to the moon and distorts it that way,” Dunn explains.
So, yeah, “Oh, Monolith” really blasts off. The record also features contributions from the duo’s talented friends — Elli Makinen provided flute, while Bex Heller played trumpet. Those two, plus Victoria D'Angelo and Lillian Fuglei, came together for gang vocals, too. All four will be doing their thing live at the show as well.
While sharing some of the Lookout Mountain Charley songs from the stage recently, audiences have even been moved to moshing.
“That’s not a typical experience of past Blankslate shows, but it’s been really cool to fall into that,” Dunn says.
But Blankslate isn’t your typical indie band either, and if the sophomore record proves anything, it’s that the duo is doing just fine.
“I like to joke that we’re like a five-piece with two members,” Condron concludes.
Blankslate, with Clementine and Rosebay, 8 p.m. Thursday, August 7, Skylark Lounge, 140 South Broadway. Tickets are $18.
