Dehd’s Jason Balla Bringing New Project Accessory to Bottom of the Hill
Photo Credit: Jason Balla
As the lead guitarist for the great Chicago garage rock trio Dehd, Jason Balla makes for an electrifying, invigorating live presence. A captivating ball of energy, Balla’s limbs are constantly moving and his beaming smile is ever-present, creating the perfect embodiment of the raucous, party-like atmosphere of the band.
Yet for his first solo album—billed under his Accessory moniker—Balla brings a distinctively different approach—a contemplative, quiet and subdued sound that showcases the breadth and depth of his artistry. Released on April 17, Accessory’s “Dust” might come as a surprise for Dehd fans expecting another reprise of indie rock antics, but Balla said the album is actually a reflection of his most natural writing tendencies.
“This music really reflects my natural state of being—like if I just pick up the guitar and I’m in a room by myself, this is the type of tempo and mood that comes out,” said Balla. “When I’m in the room with Dehd, there is a lot of excitement and energy and the music is a result of that energy. But yeah, if I’m alone, I tend to make music that’s much slower, more like a Velvet Underground thing. I just gravitate towards that feeling—it’s always been my predisposition.”
Easily one of the best albums of 2026, “Dust” is a thorough and thoughtful creation from an artist with a fully formed vision. From the abstract painting that adorns the album cover to the inspired record title to the songs that all fit within a coherent, thematic throughline, “Dust” perfectly captures the ambiguity and complexity of everyday life. On May 27, Balla and his four-piece band will play collections from “Dust” at Bottom of the Hill.
While “Dust” represents the debut album from Accessory, the project dates back nearly a decade. Balla would host Accessory XL shows in his native Chicago—offering an opportunity for an amorphous, ever-changing cast of characters to jam out together in informal live settings.
The project took a significant step forward when Balla started playing around on an old piano—a gift bequeathed to him from his late mother, who passed away in 2018. The piano had been in storage for years, but just recently Balla found enough room in his apartment to house the instrument, which provided the emotional foundation for an album anchored in vulnerability and candor.
“I’m a guitar player, first and foremost—I can’t say I’m a piano player by any means,” said Balla. “But I just tried to explore sounds with the piano. I would spend mornings having coffee and just sitting at the piano. It’s such an emotive instrument and there is so much personal emotion associated with this piano, and I think you can hear that in the record.”
“Dust” is a slowcore masterpiece, a deliberately placed, somnambulant document that is quiet and serene without feeling stark or austere. Balla carefully layers different sonic elements on top of another, building a lush landscape from simple structures in a manner that recalls genre masters like Spiritualized, Low and the Red House Painters. The multilayered, gauzy sounds on the record are epitomized by the album title, with every track feeling like it’s been processed just slightly through a grainy, sepia-toned filter.
“It was really important for me to explore the different textures of recorded music,” said Balla. “I wanted to create something that felt modern but also organic. I keep talking about painting, because I’ve been taking it up lately, but there is a book I’m reading where the author talks about the magic of mixing colors. There’s a moment where you put blue in some water. Before you do that, the blue is just blue and the water is just water. But the thing that's universally interesting to people is that 30 seconds when the paint is sending its little tendrils down creating this state of change. That’s what I want to convey with this music.”
And whereas his yawping, excitable deliveries for Dehd are the spark for the androgynous back-and-forth vocals between him and Emily Kempf, on “Dust,” Balla sings in a cooing, billowing register—an appropriate mechanism for an album dealing with weighty themes.
Throughout the album, Balla expresses pain, regret and sadness, interspersing those topics with moments of happiness and gratitude—creating that kind of fluidity and variability that one finds when mixing paint together. His best songs—tracks like “World of Pain,” “Calcium,” “Dogbite” and “Blood (Magnetic)”—are beautiful ballads, deftly expressing the complicated and complex meaning of the human experience.
To wit—for the stirring closing of “Blood {Magnetic)” Balla plaintively asks, “Who can you trust with your heart,” a question that turns into a moment of affirmation, when he repeatedly declares “trust with your heart,” over and over again.
“I really see this record as being about the beginning of something and also the end,” said Balla. “It’s grappling with all the remnants of this destruction we’re seeing in the world—where there is much hatred in our everyday life. But it’s also about the building blocks of these new possibilities. In a lot of ways, it encapsulates that hope and optimism we have to cling to in the face of all these negative aspects.”
Those are enormously profound premises to base an album around, but as “Dust” clearly illustrates, Balla is unafraid to tackle the vast gray areas that permeate our life.
Show Details:
Accessory with Facing and Badvril
Where: Bottom of the Hill
When: 8 p.m.. Wednesday, May 27
Tickets: $16, available here.