Track By Tracks: Eternal Dialtone - Eternal Dialtone (2026)

Hello, Breathing the Core readers! My name's Rich, and I play guitar for Eternal Dialtone. We just released our self-titled EP on March 27th. It's 3 songs and 13 minutes of instrumental heavy rock influenced by psych, desert, stoner, and doom. It was recorded in a 100-year-old former Catholic Church, which is now a recording studio called Anacortes Unknown, and mixed by Matt Bayles. You can listen to it now on Bandcamp or any regular streaming provider.

 

The opening track on our self-titled record is called Number One Dialtone. This was the first song we wrote together. We were hanging out in the rehearsal space, and Steve (bass) was playing the main riff. Both Burke (drums) and I were like "do that again!". So he did, and we played it over and over again. It has this tension between a desert/stoner rock sensibility and a high-energy anthemic pulse. It’s really all killer, no filler 2-minute song! We kept thinking about how it would go over on stage and focused our energy on transitions that would keep raising the energy level. We tracked guitars for this with a Vox AC30 and a Benson Earhart with a Stratocaster with flat wound strings, which is the source of the mid-range honk tone. It’s all one guitar track, except for the doubled-up leads at the end.

 

The second song is called Song Duex Part Two. Although the final version doesn't sound like it, this song started as a delay pedal-driven guitar part that snowballed into a "freight train off the tracks" style jam. It was always fun, but we didn’t have a big picture vision. So we just kept playing it over and over again, which is really how we write all of our material. Through repetition, we settled into the tempo and feel of the main part. Then we started adding melodies to the point where we could hum them. Then, we ditched the delay pedal entirely. On the recording, we used my vintage Orange OR120 guitar amp through a JBL K120 style speaker to get the sharper metallic tone - but just on this song. The amp is 52 years old and still rips!

 

On the last song, Third Song, the rhythm section established a deep groove that we knew we wanted to build a song around. We really focused on finding the sweet spot for the groove and staying there. All the other parts were added around the main groove. This final version of this track wound up being the most representative of how it feels when we are spontaneously jamming.

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