Persephone’s Picnic is our new album, arriving worldwide October 14, 2026.
Some of these songs are new. Others have been traveling with us for years, changing shape as we changed with them. Material we first released between 2021 and 2024 kept moving through rehearsals, performances, new arrangements, new sounds and a steadily rebuilt live system. By the time we came back to record them for this album, they had accumulated some mileage.
The record gathers that whole stretch of Dutch Holly into one place: new songs beside newly recorded versions of material that refused to sit still.
Persephone’s Picnic is where those songs are now, in 2026.
The sound of the album
Electronic indie pop is the center of gravity here. Around it: synthesizers, programmed rhythm, guitars, layered vocals, electronic textures and the occasional bit of machinery behaving as though it has developed its own opinion about the song it’s become a part of.
The songs wander through dream pop, indietronica, trip-hop, new wave, art rock and more cinematic territory without changing passports every time the scenery shifts. Now can settle into a darker downtempo pocket. Stars Are What You’re Made Of leans toward electronic groove and art-pop. The Me You See Now lives somewhere more shadowed and cinematic. Spirit Eyes and Phoenix move between dreamier atmospheres and rhythmic propulsion.
We tend to think less in genres than in environments. The common thread is melody, electronic production, Jen’s ethereal and layered vocal sound, Tres’s synth and MIDI architecture, and guitars that still carry a little post-punk dust on their boots.
Advance Releases
Ahead of the album drop, we put out a couple of singles to show what we’ve been up to:
Track List:
- Spirit Eyes
- The Me You See Now
- Magick
- Now
- Summer
- Let the Light In
- Phoenix
- Stars Are What You’re Made Of
- Funny Girl (11the Anniversary Edition)
Why “Persephone’s Picnic?”
The title comes from Persephone’s descent into the Underworld and, especially, the pomegranate seeds she eats there.
In the myth, the snack has consequences. Eating the food of the Underworld binds Persephone to that realm. The pomegranate carries deep meaning and symbolism: hospitality accepted, a contract entered, marriage and union, fertility and mortality, the agricultural cycle, winter and return.
Persephone changes with the crossing. Kore, the maiden associated with flowers and spring, becomes Persephone, Queen of the Underworld—a figure who belongs to both worlds and moves between them.
That tension runs through the album: transformation, divided identities, darkness and illumination, departure and return, and the ways an experience can change the person who comes back from it. The songs move between worlds like our real life experiences.
The Persephone Protocol
Somewhere along the way, the mythology behind the album leaked into the Dutch Holly sci-fi universe.
This seemed like a perfectly reasonable excuse to make a four-part serial.
The Persephone Protocol follows Jen’s return to the Underworld at Hades’ ridiculous insistence, and Tres’s increasingly complicated attempts to help her get back to the Right-Side-Up. Commander Ivy has Galactic-level intel on the situation, and of course, marching orders. The Merchant Tapes interdimensional waypoint is open for business and store associates ALLHAILPAN and Erin P. help with the rescue operation. Storyteller Meg Bohrman comes in clutch with considerably older intelligence about descent, return, and what it takes to bring somebody home from the Underworld.
The four episodes lead through the weeks approaching Persephone’s Picnic and the October 17 album release party:
Episode 1 — The Ruler Below
Episode 2 — The Merchant Frequency
Episode 3 — The Song of Return
Episode 4 — Live from the Underworld
Making Persephone’s Picnic
In early 2017, we stepped away from performing live as a looping duo.
We had spent several years building shows around a menagerie of instruments + a looper multiplied by real-time arrangements. It was intricate, occasionally heroic, and it was really placing constraints on the music we wanted to play. Some of our songs simply weren’t being performed because making them behave inside the looping setup was more trouble than we could reasonably go to at a gig: You only get so much setup time.
So we stopped booking shows for a while and looked toward the horizon.
Working in the studio changed the considerations. We stopped asking Can we pull this off with the looper? That freed us up to ask instead: What should this song actually sound like?
Game changer.
After a couple of years of experimenting without the old live-looping constraints, Magick and The Me You See Now began to emerge.
Let the Light In, Now, and Stars Are What You’re Made Of followed. Beats, programmed parts, synthesizers, guitars and production ideas could go wherever they wanted. We had become an indie electronic recording artist, and eventually the live show had to catch up.
So we rebuilt it.
The recordings became the blueprint and the live system learned how to translate them to live audiences. Then, the traffic started moving both ways. By 2024, we were hauling these songs around the Southwest, playing them for audiences, tinkering with arrangements, changing sounds, adding textures, finding out where the tunes wanted to go next.
They kept evolving.
Persephone’s Picnic captures that long studio → stage → studio loop (so to speak) and presents the songs in their current 2026 state.