The Story
Dirty Projectors is the vehicle of composer and guitarist Dave Longstreth, a band that has treated every album as a chance to start over. The early records were conceptual to the point of stubbornness, but Bitte Orca (2009) was the breakthrough — knotty rhythms, R&B-flecked pop hooks and the interlocking soprano harmonies of Amber Coffman, Angel Deradoorian and Haley Dekle.
In 2010 the band recorded Mount Wittenberg Orca with Björk, a collaborative EP whose proceeds went to ocean conservation. Swing Lo Magellan (2012) then pulled toward something looser and more handmade, songs that sounded caught in the act of being written.
The 2017 self-titled album marked a hard reset: made largely alone by Longstreth after his split with Coffman — both his bandmate and his partner — it was the sound of a group dismantling and rebuilding around a single voice.
From Lamp Lit Prose (2018) onward the harmonies and collaborators returned, and the band kept moving. What holds across two decades is the through-line of Longstreth's writing: rigorous, restless, and constitutionally unable to repeat itself.
