B-Side Guys

The palace Düül Suns build in their latest track is transparent for a reason—it’s an invitation into a fantasy so perfect it admits its own impossibility. “It’s just a dream / It’s never gonna come true,” James Ruffino and Nick Grau sing without apology, before immediately pivoting to “But it’s a dream / That I’d like to share with you.” It’s the most honest pickup line in psychedelic rock: come live in my delusion with me.

The NYC quartet self-produced this track in a Brooklyn basement, and the choice to record underground feels appropriate for a song about constructing alternate realities. Their sound pulls from the serious riffs of Pink Floyd at Pompeii and the psych-soul grooves of Khruangbin, but what elevates “Palace of Glass” is how they deploy that hefty instrumental arsenal in service of something genuinely tender. The vocal harmonies between Ruffino and Grau drift through Nick Grau’s keys and synths like smoke, creating the kind of dreamy, echoey layers that Night Beats built their reputation on.

Lyrically, the song functions as an escalating series of erasures. First, the past vanishes, then the seasons, then memories, questions, and finally choice itself. The palace promises liberation through negation: no aging, no limits, no fear, no need to manage anything. It’s seductive precisely because it’s suffocating—the kind of love that offers everything by demanding you bring nothing, not even yourself. When the song insists “there’s nothing you need to be,” it sounds like freedom until you realize it might also be obliteration.

WFMU’s Clay Pigeon called their debut single “Jealousy” a stone cold jam, and “Palace of Glass” earns the same designation through different means. Where some psych-rock bands use their genre’s toolkit to explore outer space, Düül Suns turn inward, using all that reverb and shimmer to map the interior architecture of romantic fantasy. The glass palace isn’t meant to last. That’s why they’re inviting you in before it shatters.