Smokey Brights

Dashboard Heat isn’t just another collection of songs for Smokey Brights. It’s the culmination of years of work and the closing of a long emotional loop.

The Seattle band Devlin leads with Kim West (alongside Nick Krivchenia and Luke Logan) has built a reputation for turning the weight of real life into something bright and defiant. It's wrestling with the tension we all feel—grief and humor, exhaustion and joy—even as they keep things sonically buoyant.

As Smokey Brights readies its latest release, Devlin sat down with us to talk about a bigger mission to shine a light in the darkest corners.

Analogue: We’re so close to the release date of Dashboard Heat. How are your emotions at a time like this?

Ryan Devlin: It's a huge release. I was really stressing in the weeks leading up to it, and a friend of mine used the metaphor: “It’s almost harvest time.” It's like the work never ceases when you're kind of leading up to the harvest, and that’s been true for us.

We have a bunch of West Coast tour dates and East Coast tour dates. We're independent artists, so if you see the news shared on YouTube or Instagram, that’s us. So just to get to that point was an immense feeling of relief and release.

But also, to have friends and supporters like reach out and say, ‘Hey, I'm listening right now and it’s so cool.’ It’s a reminder of, ‘Oh yeah, it's new for you.’ But we recorded it in the summer of 2024.

I'm still just immensely proud of it. I love all the sounds, but it's not new to me. We’ve been putting in the work for videos and listening to it and scrutinizing it. So to get any sort of outsider perspective saying it's good, it feels really awesome.

Analogue: Let me ask about the videos and all of the work there. When you want to go all-in on a set of songs like this and promote it, what choices were you making about packaging it all for fans, knowing you’re having to do all the work as well?

Ryan: Well, with Dashboard Heat, we really tried to create a whole little world. We took the full box of paints out and used all the colors. With this record, I knew it was going to take some kind of storytelling and onboarding for people to understand this world. For the past year, we've been strategizing on how to start sharing this with people.

We're really lucky. We have a really supportive, devoted following here in the Pacific Northwest. One of the things we did to first introduce the new songs… we did two nights at a little theater called the Rabbit Box at Pike Place Market here in Seattle. Before anyone had heard anything, we played the record to a room of fans in its entirety, just stripped down and acoustic.

Analogue: How'd that go?

Ryan: It was awesome. It was also completely nerve-wracking because we recorded it and videotaped it. I was like, ‘I hope this goes well!’ It was two sold-out nights. So we got two rooms full of people and said, ‘You're not gonna hear anything you wanna hear. I mean, you're not gonna hear any of the old hits.’ [Laughs] Of course, we did sneak in some of the old ones at the end.

That was the first little part of the birth of this thing, and getting that real-time reaction and love back was the first indicator. It felt like, ‘Okay, these songs are special to us, but I think they'll be special to other people.’

Analogue: And those videos?

Ryan: We consider ourselves really fortunate, because we have this really deep creative network of folks here in Seattle who do visual art and video art and are storytellers. Quite literally, my favorite part of doing a big project like this is reaching out to other talented friends and saying, ‘You’re a dope filmmaker. Here's the song. What do you want to do?’ We've really empowered a lot of artist friends to like take a little bit of our world and build it out.

Our buddy Jamie Henwood made this beautiful video for our song “Home”. Jamie does these achingly beautiful and sweet videos for TikTok and Instagram where he plays every character in the video, but he's like a kid. And we have this song, “Home,” that's very much about childhood. It's about me moving from Seattle to Tacoma when I was a kid, and showing up at a new school and my parents going through a divorce—that kind of stuff. He took this really heavy idea and made it really playful and beautiful and fun.

There's just been a lot of that. We kind of sketch it out, and then we hand that sketch to a really talented friend, and they build something that injects new life into it. That's the most exciting part, creating more creativity. That's what we need.

Analogue: In that live setting, did the audience pick up on the songs you thought were extra-special?

Ryan: Yeah, there’s a lot of like humor on this record. Like we have a song called “North Gateway”. It's the very first song on the record, and it's a serious song in that it's really where we live. It’s this little portrait, but it's kind of funny. Playing it live in that scenario for the first time, I felt like a standup comedian on stage trying out new material, so when you hear sincere laughter back, you think, ‘Okay, cool, this might connect.’ You don't know if people are gonna get the joke, and that was one that was really surprising.

We posted a little clip on TikTok. We’ve forced ourselves to get on TikTok. We're like elder millennials. But it got the most insane response from like a bunch of Seattleites being like, ‘Oh my God, I live on Northgate! I grew up on Northgate! I bought my tires at that tire shop!’ So that was like a really cool indicator.

Beyond the notes of humor, there's a lot of processing of grief in this record, too. You might put it on, and the guitars are so brash and the harmonies are so bright. We are a kind of sparkly rock band. Things feel really positive. But within all those sounds, there is the reality that we were saying goodbye to my father-in-law—Kim’s dad—who had a several-year battle with cancer while writing this record. We even had to reschedule the recording session because we were in the midst of saying goodbye and being present for that moment.

So that’s to say, there are some songs where we're really processing that stuff. We're not super didactic and saying, ‘This is what it's about,’ but we got a lot of people sincerely crying, too. So in real time, we were able to say, ‘Okay, the jokes land and also the tragic turns are felt sincerely.’

That’s my hope for this record. It’s a big arc. It’s a big journey, like a hero's journey. It starts at home, and then we go someplace foreign, and maybe we don't get the thing we were seeking, but the lesson we learned is the thing we needed to learn. So it's been cool to see people receiving that emotional storytelling, too.

Analogue: Is that a purposeful juxtaposition for the band? To keep things buoyant while wrestling with very real things?

Ryan: That really is, even with the name Smokey Brights. We are kind of constantly trying to deal with reality—real emotions, loss, grief, the great uncertainty that we're facing right now on all sorts of levels—but I don't want to stop there. I want to give people some tools or a path of release to keep it buoyant. I think one of our most powerful coping mechanisms that humans have is laughter and like kind of making light of the really heavy stuff.

So, yeah, it was really intentional to be like, ‘Okay, we're going to have some like truly fun stuff that is reflecting on themes of home and childhood, and that's going to make it a little easier to receive some of the truly more dark, heavy kind of feelings.’

Analogue: Is there a single song that serves as the thesis for that on this album?

Ryan: I mean, there are a couple of songs. That song “Home” is literally from the POV of a kiddo going through a divorce. And in this instance, it's about my folks splitting and me being othered at a new school and having a custody exchange at a mall every weekend. It’s all the crummy parts of that experience, but then it's also got these little bits of humor—my aunt smoking weed behind the Astro Van, my stepdad showing off his stupid new tattoo, my mom getting me some Payless shoes that aren't cool. It's the layered cake of pain and laughter.

Another is “Running from the Moon”, which is a big extended metaphor of trying to run from grief or trying to hide from grief and change and death. That’s like running from the moon. It's a thing that's just gonna keep looming over you.

We took those feelings and tried it in a bunch of different arrangements, but eventually it ended up this sort of Euro-dance song. It’s like, ‘You could like dance in the club to your feelings of loss and grief.’ So, yeah, it's kind of all peppered in there.

It's funny. We’ll talk about this record, and it’s clear we’re processing a lot of feelings. Then you put it on and it's bright and brash and funny with big harmonies and stuff like that. So, yeah, I don't wanna like scare people away, but it's dealing with real stuff.

VISIT: Smokey Brights