Indie rock is a genre that’s been recently subverted by teenagers left unattended with a microphone and cheap production software – leading the genre astray from its roots. Dylan Chenfeld’s Rebounder has been brewing a sound that is at the heart of alternative rock while crafting music that’s multidimensional. Describing the project in a sentence, he says, “Rebounder makes indie rock from the future, a future in which songs are for dancing and thinking.”
Having opened for The Neighbourhood multiple times in 2018, Rebounder has gone on to release a handful of singles like 2019’s “Slow Angel” or the languid and spacey “Lovers”.
In the years since those performances, Rebounder has gone on to receive acclaim from a fanbase of alt lovers to the tune of over 250’000 Spotify monthly listeners. With only a handful of singles independently released, Chenfeld has upwards of 4 million streams on Spotify, saying, “The goal has always been to be a self-contained artist and make as much different music as I want, then to go and play great shows.” While the live show era has been on pause, prior to COVID-19, a touring lineup consisted of Chenfeld, Zack Kantor, and Chenfeld’s brothers, Cobey Arner and Chenfeld’s main songwriting partner and bass player, Noah Chenfeld.
With a project that started in the era of accessibility and computer software, Chenfeld still believes in tradition. Even with the capacity to self-produce, “My go-to software is a guitar,” he says. “I find all the software and internet incredibly distracting, I want as much of the idea pure, then I just use the tools to get it sounding good.” Whether it is the languid sound of “Lovers” or the bass-driven adventure that is “Night Sports,” the bottom line is that the diversity of sound is a feat Chenfeld has been able to achieve with years of experience, where Rebounder is the product of “putting together all the pieces of the different musical experiences from over the years into one.”
A New Yorker at heart, Chenfeld went on to talk about his favorite acts from his hometown, citing names like Blondie, “They covered a lot of musical ground in a really organic way,” he says. The Beastie Boys, who, “From hardcore to instrumental lounge, there isn’t something they didn’t tackle in an exciting way,” he says. The list of great acts is capped off by “The Strokes – come on, you know why. Me trying to tell you why The Strokes are great is like tickling yourself..it just won’t work..listen and you’ll know.” The delineation is rounded off with honorable mentions to “Artie Shaw, Lady Gaga, 50 Cent, Velvet Underground, Wu-Tang, and Vampire Weekend.”
The self-proclaimed “avid Springsteen fan who is very inspired by his commitment to both songwriting and a great live show,” dove into his pattern for releasing music in the new year. “If the song sounds great then it is time to release it,” he says. With their new single “Premium Fantasy,” slated for release in the coming weeks, the vibrant earworm seems to ask itself when there will be more songs like it. With new music on the horizon this year, it is not unusual for the “Japanese Posters” singer to tease about his plans to launch, “The new stuff all sounds like a record. Who knows how much time will be between the songs but when they are all unified on one project and you listen to them front to back, you will feel like you are listening to a record, not a collection of singles. That is important to me, lots of music in 2021.”
From opening up shows for The Neighbourhood, to playing the renowned Bowery Ballroom, the Spotify numbers speak for themselves. Many projects burn up and die young before reaching comparable feats. Chenfeld is now sitting on something that people are drawn to, something that is both fun and real. On the topic of a debut album, Chenfeld said, “I think I am going to release a song a month in 2021, then unify all the old songs on one record and the new on a different [one] to show the difference,” If someday soon a full-length Rebounder album were released, it wouldn’t be unreasonable to think that they could go very far.
