DOGSTAR 1 sounds like memory itself – fractured, intimate and beautiful.
There’s something about DOGSTAR 1 that feels a little like sitting inside someone else’s memory.
Not the big memories either, the small ones. Like sitting on the couch watching TV. Wanting to be alone, then immediately not wanting to be alone. Hearing a stranger say a familiar name. Remembering the smell of cedar, an old T-shirt, a dog, a summer that happened years ago.
These are the things Jacob Klein keeps returning to on his debut LP as i give my friends flowers, and somehow, they become enormous.
The album opens with ‘EVERY MOMENT SOMETHING BEAUTIFUL DIES’, an intriguing introduction to this little gem of a record.
Piano hangs in the distance, disparate and echoey, while Klein’s vocals layer and harmonise until they finally settle into focus.
It’s reflective and introspective, touching on all the things we think and feel throughout the day without necessarily saying them out loud.
I feel like I’m sitting there with him, and it kinda rules.
I love his voice. There’s an intimacy to it that makes even the more expansive moments on DOGSTAR 1 feel close, like this is a bedroom recording that somehow grew a whole world around itself.
That world is built from a lot of loss.
Klein has spent the better part of a decade working as a producer and engineer across Nashville, Pittsburgh, New York and Asheville, but DOGSTAR 1 is the sound of turning all that attention inward.
The songs were written across some of the most formative years of his life, through the death of his grandfather, the loss of friends to the drug epidemic in Pennsylvania, the illness and eventual death of his young dog, and the aftermath of Hurricane Helene.
When Helene tore through Asheville in 2024, Klein was already rebuilding his life there. The disaster destroyed homes and businesses and scattered a community he had only recently begun to call home.
While helping with mutual aid and checking in on neighbours, he was also forced to reckon with how much grief he had been carrying long before the storm arrived.
That feels important to DOGSTAR 1, because the album doesn’t really move in a straight line.
It remembers the way we remember.
‘cloud-hidden, chamomile’ is a perfect example. The song drifts through disconnected physical details — a seashell, a T-shirt, cedar, rain, thunder — as if Klein is trying to work out whether the world around him is still the same.
There’s a looseness to the production, too, with double-tracked acoustic guitar, layered vocals and a wall of backing harmonies giving the whole thing the hazy feeling of a thought you’re still trying to finish.
Then ‘sara’s not a name for dogs’ takes that idea and makes it devastatingly simple.
Someone calls their dog by the name of someone you loved, and suddenly an entire relationship comes flooding back.
An open-faced Oreo. Canvas shorts. A Lincoln Town Car. Summer snow.
That’s it. That’s the memory.
The song doesn’t bother putting any of it in chronological order, because memories don’t work like that. They arrive when they want to, dragging whole versions of people back with them.
Klein’s natural vocals trade off with huge layered harmonies before strings, eBow feedback and aquatic synths carry the song away.
It’s beautiful.
And then DOGSTAR 1 starts looking beyond memory, towards the strange question of what happens when you realise you can’t go back.
‘Baby Fell in Love With a Star’ is where the album’s cosmic thread really takes hold.
The song began with a cheap physics book and a strange idea about whether people might travel to stars when they die.
Klein had already been thinking about Sirius, the Dog Star, and from there the song became a way of sitting with years of loss that hadn’t necessarily been processed yet.
Sonically, it’s darker and more cosmic, built from droning synths, MPC chops, reverse keys and layers of vocals.
There’s a little Death Cab For Cutie in here, a little Postal Service, but it still feels distinctly like Klein: indie vocals floating over killer beats, melancholy made warm rather than miserable.
That combination keeps DOGSTAR 1 moving.
‘Jambs (page 39)’ gets experimental, bringing in spoken word and vocal effects, while ‘Ashes’ picks up the pace with warm keys, chopped vocal samples, acoustic guitar and layered harmonies.
It’s a poppier moment, the kind of song that feels built for a long drive with the windows down, even though the album’s emotional weight is still sitting underneath it.
‘Wolf Heart’ brings things back inward. It’s about feeling unwitnessed in your own time, looking towards history, anthropology, fiction and art for the sense of kinship that isn’t always easy to find in real life.
The production mirrors that feeling: overlapping piano, processed vocals, lo-fi textures and rich, organic instrumentation all occupying the same space.
There’s a lot happening on DOGSTAR 1, but it never feels cluttered.
That’s probably because Klein understands that grief is cluttered.
It doesn’t arrive neatly. It sits beside love, nostalgia, boredom, distraction, desire and the occasional genuinely good day.
‘pollen’ understands that especially well. The song is about all the things we reach for when we’re vulnerable — partying, new clothes, a new town, distancing ourselves from people we love, anything that might offer a quick escape.
Eventually, though, it turns towards the slower and less glamorous work of actually healing.
Even the production follows that movement, beginning with piano and vocals before expanding into warm electronic textures, bass and a chopped-up hybrid drum kit.
The accompanying video, created by Chase Hudson, takes the same idea somewhere stranger, following Klein and his dog Sparrow through collapsing timelines and portals.
It feels completely at home beside an album that treats memory as something fluid rather than fixed.
Because that’s what DOGSTAR 1 ultimately sounds like to me: the moment when you stop trying to put your life back exactly how it was.
Named for Sirius, the Dog Star, the record is about losing people to death, distance and change, but also about continuing to choose love and creation anyway. Its twelve songs move through grief in fragments — a dog called by the wrong name, wedding vows, a relationship dissolving, a childhood home that feels slightly different when you return to it.
The album closes with ‘better days’, and it’s a lovely way to leave things. Piano and vocals sit quietly together, without demanding some grand resolution.
Just a little space.
Maybe that’s the point of DOGSTAR 1. Not everything needs to be fixed. Some things just need to be felt, remembered and eventually carried somewhere new.
And if tomorrow isn’t promised, there’s something pretty special about making something beautiful today.
