shadowdog by tirestires

released November 16, 2025

vinyl remastered by new mexican stargazers

performers on shadowdog are:

tyse
tristan
sarah
rachel
peter
peter
paul
patrick
nathan
naomi
michael gira
matt
justin
jonathan
jamie
james
daniel
bert
althea

//

in 2015 i released a brainrotted bedroom pop record about gooning and incel culture. behind walls of digital processing i buried stilted lyrics with pornographic aesthetics that auto-fictionalized how my parents’ divorce impacted my disastrous first relationship. the production continues to turn heads and stomachs. some music forum freaks argue it’s the most singular album of the 21st century. today marks the 10th anniversary of shadowdog’s release. dawk26 is putting it out on vinyl to celebrate and it’s now live on streaming for the first time.

//

the earliest shadowdog demos were written between spring 2012 and summer 2013 for my jangle pop group. our disbanding in tandem with a romantic breakup led me to corrupt my orphaned collection of concise slacker rock tracks. i recorded endless sessions with local indie musicians and layered wonky orchestral samples over the initial pop song structures.

under the influence of weed and isolation and delusions of self-grandeur i approached the album with great ambition. i was into tinymixtapes’ early vaporwave reviews and mark richardson and lindsay zoladz’s p4k columns and chris ott’s vimeo (ahhhh) and the films of robert bresson and arcade fire and real estate and guided by voices and the olivia tremor control and aphex twin and jai paul and katie dey and vektroid and giant claw and steve reich. i was insufferably pretentious and an abysmal hang.

across summer 2014 i replaced every syllable of the lyrics with distant and truncated prose that awkwardly followed the original melodies and rendered the text deeply uncanny. the writing style was largely conceived while delivering newspapers in the south london ontario suburbs six nights a week while i listened to a primitive robotic text-to-speech voice read taipei by tao lin over and over again (i got through this book like four times in three months). in the early mornings i’d return home and write poetry until i passed out.

i couldn’t figure out how jai paul achieved his signature sound so i manually hard-cut clips to produce a janky approximation of traditional sidechain effects. the mixdowns were run through dense syncopating filters and turned into alien textures before smashing against limiters. finally the masters were chopped and screwed. shadowdog was completed in fall 2015.

//

i never announced the album to people irl. most of the performers never heard the final product. it was exclusively marketed through self-shilling on /mu/ during winter 2016. shadowdog quickly became a symbol of shame at the center of my life and i took it offline. the album was re-uploaded later that summer by a youtube channel named ‘thunder birdz’.

shadowdog had developed a small cult following by the end of the 2010s. much of the interest focused on the enigma of its creation and who its depraved anonymous creator may have been. several 4chan threads speculated it was produced by notorious aussie shitposter aaron ellis (it wasn’t). a youtuber made a video essay titled ‘the shadowdog mystery: weirdest album online’ (it isn’t). many understood the narrative to be a work of pure autobiography (it’s not). popular fan theories speculated it was a confession of childhood sexual abuse (i was never molested as a child).

i discovered the album had a growing fan community on the brave little abacus discord server in 2020. i began anonymously interacting with fans online. i’ve since made many of my closest friends through online communities who supported my work. my favorite part of the record’s afterlife is how it influenced artists like clust.r and guinevere laurent to create albums directly drawing from the shadowdog sound. my new band friends& is both its own project and a functional continuation of tirestires.

//

shadowdog is an intensely polarizing record. i believe its countless extreme aesthetic decisions are what makes it special. i interpret rym users and youtube commenters' descriptions of the album as ‘groundbreaking’ in a value-neutral way. it is not for everyone. i encourage anyone still on the fence about this album to read the rateyourmusic reviews. supposedly real human beings claim to actually love it !!

is shadowdog simply a signifier of esoteric taste for avant-teens to individuate themselves on rym?? or is it a revolutionary pop record that reveals itself more and more on repeat listens?? some serious music obsessives have fallen under its spell. you may too.

//

i’m very proud of the 8-page booklet accompanying the vinyl. it’s packed full of screengrabs documenting the album’s history and three thoughtful essays. there’s even a face reveal. i think you will love this physical release if you love shadowdog.

//

as a final piece of context i am including a passage that deeply informed the creation of this album and my artistic philosophy. it’s from lindsay zoladz’s ordinary machines column about jai paul in 2013:

"the first time i heard jai paul, i thought my speakers were broken... i jiggled the input cable. i unplugged and replugged my speakers. i started the song over. nothing had changed. ‘is it supposed to sound like this?’ i typed into my gchat box, but hesitated before hitting send. (on the internet, even your hesitation is visible: ‘lindsay has entered text…’) i let it sink in for a minute; the first time you hear something that is good in a new, unfamiliar way, it takes time for the particles to rearrange into some sort of discernible grammar. by the time the second chorus hit, i had deleted the question. yes, it was supposed to sound like that.”

nostalgia cycles and pastiche are becoming less and less useful as tools for discerning music’s originality. our era’s most exciting artistic developments increasingly come from the realms of texture and presentation. i believe this record delivers a highly original production texture and presentation. even as the conlanger of its indiscernible grammar shadowdog feels indiscernible and unfamiliar.

- tirestires