There’s a moment, early on in conversation with Jason Balla, the name behind solo act moniker Accessory, where he describes the songs that became Dust, his new album that’s out today,as something that had been quietly accumulating. He talks about files sitting in a Dropbox, dozens deep, waiting for a reason to exist outside of it. Not a grand declaration of “it’s time to make an album,” but something more inevitable. “I kind of just reached a critical mass,” he says.

That sense of quiet build feels baked into the record itself. Dust doesn’t arrive as a statement so much as it unfolds like something that’s been happening for a long time. It offers songs written in the margins of a life already in motion, slowly cohering into something with its own internal logic. Balla had always been writing, having previously been involved with three-piece indie rock band Dehd, but Accessory offered a different container for his songs. “I want to present myself as a songwriter,” he says, plainly.

There’s a shift in that framing that steers away from the shared identity of a band and toward something more solitary, more exposed. The album lives in that space, giving it a sense of personal without being insular, deliberate without losing its sense of looseness. Even structurally, it resists the idea of being reverse-engineered into a concept. The songs weren’t written to serve a theme, but they circle the same emotional terrain, written in the same stretch of time, responding to the same weight.

That weight is hard to ignore. There’s a tension running through Dust that never quite resolves, a push and pull between optimism and something heavier. When asked about it, Balla doesn’t frame those states as opposites so much as coexisting forces. “I think they’re both just happening at the same time,” he says. “It’s like, everything’s so bad, so much. But in the face of that, also, it’s somewhat more easy to manage when you’re like, ‘Well, at the end of the day, I’m kind of just one small piece of this giant thing.’ There’s a lightness to it, which kind of helps ride the waves.” 

That duality shows up in subtler ways, too. There’s a thread in our conversation about how easy it is to become accustomed to that weight, how quickly “awfulness is being normalized.” It’s not framed as a revelation so much as a quiet realization, like something you notice only after the fact, when you’ve already adapted to it. The record sits inside that tension, holding both the awareness and the resistance to it.

If Dust feels grounded in something tangible, it’s because it is. Much of it was written on a piano that once belonged to Balla’s late mother, an instrument that functions less like a tool and more like a point of entry. He describes it as “a physical conduit of my mom’s memory,” a way of keeping something present even as time moves forward. “[It was like] including her in the album and in my life currently, which is nice because it’s [allows me to] be able to move on but keep something alive.” 

Grief, as he puts it, doesn’t move in straight lines. It loops back on itself, resurfaces unexpectedly, shifts shape over time. The record doesn’t try to pin that down. Instead, it allows those feelings to exist alongside everything else. The quieter moments, the lighter ones, the ones that don’t feel like grief at all until they do. There’s a kind of openness to it, a willingness to let those emotional states overlap without forcing them into clarity.

That same openness extends to the way the album was made. Balla talks about being drawn to music that feels lived-in, where you can hear the environment it came from, imperfections and incidental sounds and all. “I’ve been really inspired by stuff where you can tell that people made it,” he explains. “It has their fingerprints on it and it feels loose. You can record anything now, and the stuff you hear on the radio these days is so polished and computer heavy. The records that definitely stand out to me as feeling special are the ones that hold this kind of looseness where can feel the performances and you can hear what’s happening in the room. I’m right next to an alley, and I have a garden next to this window. And so it’s like, you have birds and animals running around. You have people screaming in the alley, fighting each other. I like the actual context that this music is made. It’s not just like in some studio vacuum.”

Providing listeners with that unedited context of natural Chicago living ambience gives the record a sense of immediacy, but also a refusal to isolate the music from the world it was made in. Even as Balla is interested in digital textures and the ways technology shapes how we experience things, there’s a deliberate effort to hold onto something tactile. To make something that feels contemporary without flattening it into perfection. “How do you do it in a way that’s not just repetitive,” he asks, “but still can feel modern?”

That question doesn’t get a clean answer, and the album doesn’t pretend to offer one. Instead, it exists in the attempt.

And as beautiful and human as all that may be, it doesn’t come without its sense of solitude, especially for someone who’s used to working with a band. For the most part, Balla is the only person inside it while it’s being made, as he serves as the one writing, recording, sitting with the parts that work and the ones that don’t. He talks about the absence of immediate feedback, of not having someone there to share in the small victories. “You really have to be your own motor,” he says.

That solitude doesn’t read as isolation so much as self-reliance. A necessity more than a choice. It sharpens the sense that Dust is less about arriving at answers and more about working through the process of asking the questions in the first place. By the time the album is finished, when the sessions are closed and the songs are no longer in flux, it takes on a kind of separation. It becomes something that can exist outside of him, even if it still carries his fingerprints. Something that can be heard, interpreted, taken in by other people.

But the central tension, the one between light and dark, doesn’t resolve. It isn’t meant to. “I think that’s just gonna be like a constant battle within myself,” he admits. “I think it’s something that’s probably been there since I was a little kid, honestly, and it’s just the way it goes. Making the music is part of the way of dealing with it, my own emotional world. It’s like therapy in its own way.”

Ultimately, even as Balla admits, making the record doesn’t fix that. It doesn’t simplify it. If anything, it makes it more visible. But it does offer a way through, even if it may be temporary or incomplete. A way of putting language, or at least shape, to something that might otherwise stay unspoken.

And maybe that’s where Dust lands. Perhaps it’s not meant to be a resolution, but a process, as most things are. And, like Balla’s “emotional world,” it stands as something still in motion, still negotiating, and holding space for both the heavy weight and light at the same time.

Dust is out now.