Dolo Tonight Turns a Childhood Memory Into His Own Universe With DVD Rental Store
The New Jersey artist builds an entire cinematic universe inside his debut album DVD Rental Store - a story stitched together from foam monsters, broken memories, and the glow of an old TV left on too long.
When Dolo Tonight talks about his debut album DVD Rental Store, it doesn’t sound like an artist explaining a rollout. It sounds like someone describing a place they accidentally built. Half of it exists in New Jersey, the other half inside a busted VHS player that never got thrown out.
The concept came from a single thought. The feeling of walking through a Blockbuster as a kid, staring at a wall of cases you couldn’t see inside. No trailers. No thumbnails. Just a guess and a little hope. That kind of mystery sits at the center of DVD Rental Store. Every track feels like another movie pulled from the shelf.
The record wasn’t written in order. It grew from scraps, voice notes, half-recorded melodies, and fragments of conversations saved on a phone. You can hear that lack of structure in the best way possible. It feels discovered rather than planned. “Live Your Life” came first. It’s loud, twitchy, and bright in a way that feels almost nervous. Guitars cut through the mix like daylight leaking under a door. It’s Dolo at his most open, singing about freedom while still gripping the steering wheel too tight.
Then the project veers into “Hate You Now.” It hits like a diary entry that got left on the table by mistake. Piano chords echo over a beat that refuses to stay straight. The tone flips halfway through, sliding into a skit that sounds like a voicemail from someone who never learned how to apologize. It’s funny and unsettling at once, which fits him perfectly. The song started slow and sad before mutating into this jagged, stomping moment of self-awareness. It’s as if the record is teaching itself not to wallow.
“Hotel On Your Heart” came out of nowhere. Written and recorded in a single stretch, it builds around one strange image: constructing a hotel on someone’s heart and choosing to live there. It’s romantic but warped, like a pop song written by someone who thinks in metaphors before sentences. The production keeps it warm, almost too warm, like the air inside a car that’s been sitting in the sun. It’s the sound of obsession translated into architecture.
Every song on DVD Rental Store got a video. Dolo co-directed them with filmmaker Kalik Osborne, but the world they built wouldn’t exist without Danah Lee, who created every prop by hand - foam monsters, cardboard sets, fake storefronts, entire rooms that look like movie dreams. Nothing about it looks digital. You can tell someone actually touched it. The sets breathe like living things, held together by glue guns and imagination.
The aesthetic lands somewhere between Be Kind Rewind and old Japanese hero shows, where everything looks fake but alive. There’s a villain named Pink Eye, a fish suit, and a neighborhood of oddball characters who feel both ridiculous and strangely real. The camera work leans into imperfections: visible tape edits, flashing lights, color that doesn’t quite match from one frame to the next. It’s not parody; it’s commitment.
Underneath the playful visuals is something heavier. DVD Rental Store keeps circling around memory, the kind that feels more like a dream than a timeline. The skits tucked between songs feel like radio transmissions from somewhere inside the story - bits of dialogue, background noise, and phone calls that link one track to the next. They turn the album into a full loop, less a collection of songs than a single, continuous world that resets itself every time you press play.
You can sense how deliberate the sequencing is. “Weatherman” and “Two Pens” close the record by pulling the camera back. The energy softens, and the story exhales. “Weatherman” feels like sitting on a couch after everyone else has left the party, while “Two Pens” signs off like the final scene of a film that knows it has to end.
What ties everything together is tone. Dolo calls what he makes “awkward anti-pop.” It’s not a tagline; it’s just what happens when you stop sanding down your edges. The songs are catchy but crooked, confident but anxious. They sound handmade in the best way - the kind of music that leaves fingerprints.
DVD Rental Store isn’t obsessed with looking back; it’s about keeping the weird parts of the past alive long enough to make something new. The project feels like a kid’s dream that grew up and refused to get cynical. It’s a world made of burnt plastic, paper towns, and late-night inspiration. A place you can step into, even if only for thirty minutes, and remember what it’s like to imagine everything from scratch.
