Dragon Inn 3

Led by Philip Dickey, co-founder of Midwestern early aughts indie-pop phenomenon Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin, Dragon Inn 3 began as an experiment more than a decade ago. In 2012, Dickey wrote the theme song for a short film, Ghoul School, a teen horror-comedy hybrid told through an ’80s look and feel. This synth-centric instrumental eventually doubled as a jumping-off point for the infectious, pulsating sound heard throughout Dragon Inn 3’s stellar 2018 debut on American Laundromat Records, Double Line. Enlisting his sister, Sharon Bowie, and his wife, Grace Bentley, for vocals and co-writing, the group took a DIY approach to tracking, recording in fits and starts over six years amid busy work-life schedules spread across Los Angeles, Kansas City and Springfield, Missouri. The result is a lovingly-crafted take on the sultry, mysterious and rhythmical sound heard in 2011 action-drama Drive, and the soundtrack of television’s breakout cultural phenomena Stranger Things, at once nostalgic and futuristic, familiar and foreign, a pleasing amalgam of foxy Italo disco, sidelong experimentalism and commercial ’80s pop.