Premiere: Dielines, ‘Long Enough to End’

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Dielines (Photo by Megan McIsaac)

With its fingerpicked guitars, astral vocals and expansive atmospherics and arrangements, the music of L.A. duo Dielines suggests being carried to a place where everything is amorphous, especially the boundary between what is real and what is imagined. Hopes and dreams, fear and nightmares — they billow in Dielines’ hypnagogic wash of melody.

Call it dream-pop, psychedelic folk or post-rock, the music is the work of singer-songwriter Daniel Berkman, along with Trevor O’Neill, his bandmate in Possible Oceans. Dielines debuted in 2018 with the EP “Deep Breaths.” It came after Berkman, a graduate of UCLA in graphic design, left behind the agency world to focus on music and returned for a time to his native Oakland to record with Aki Ehara (songwriter/bassist/producer for the Seshend and Maha Wam).

The new single “Long Enough to End,” the first from a forthcoming full-length, was again made with Ehara. Featuring Jules de Gasperis (Red Soul X, Low Hum) on drums, the song is a rueful rumination of the machinations of online dating. “I wrote it about feeling trapped in the swiping turnstile of our often-hollow pursuit of connection,” Berkman says. It’s an ode to things that are over before they even start.

||| Stream: “Long Enough to End”

||| Live: Dielines play Aug. 12 at Resident, along with Cuesta Loeb, Twin Oaks and Possible Oceans. Tickets.

||| Previously: “Buried to Keep You Safe”