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The profile · researched 22 September 2026
Jason Balla builds a second self: eight years of Accessory singles finally become a record
Accessory is the Chicago solo project of Dehd's Jason Balla — scattered singles since 2018 that turned into a debut album, Dust, on 17 April 2026, and a shape-shifting live band now working its way across North America through the autumn.
A companion project, started quietly in 2018
Balla came up through Chicago guitar bands — first NE-HI, then Dehd, where he sings, plays guitar and produces. Accessory started in 2018 as a home for material that had nowhere to go inside a rock trio: a tape release that year, then a trickle of one-off singles. The name was chosen for what it implies about rank. As Balla put it in an interview published around the album's release, the project "is always alongside me in a way. It's the other half of my internal world and dialogue."
2018 was also the year his mother died. The piano she had given him went into storage while Dehd toured more or less continuously, and it stayed there for years. He retrieved it roughly two years before the album came out, after the touring slowed and a relationship ended, and much of what became Dust was orchestrated on it. Asked what had changed, he was blunt about the mechanics rather than the muse: "the key ingredient for success has just been having time."
For most of its first six years the project moved at the speed of a side concern — "Eyes for Berlin" in 2020, "Wherever You Are Tonight" in 2023, both issued through Fire Talk, the Chicago label that had introduced Accessory in the first place. There was no album, and for long stretches no clear sign one was coming.
The studio in Little Village
The change of pace is traceable to a room. Balla built a studio in his Little Village apartment and, by his own account, spent much of the run-up soldering it together — making his own preamps and compressors rather than buying them. It came properly online in 2025, and in November of that year he put out two shoegaze-leaning singles, "UMS" and "Do You?", recorded there. "Chain Link", released earlier in 2025 and written into a Chicago winter, dealt with loss and family.
Working alone removed the clock. He recorded several of the songs repeatedly, letting each version develop its own character, and has described the isolation of that method as a real cost as much as a freedom. The writing itself stretched back much further: he has said the songs span eight to ten years of work, with most of the finished album assembled in the final two, lyrics and melodies rewritten each time his views shifted.
The textures come from the same DIY instinct. Granular synthesis runs through the record, with a FABRIKAT pedal shaping the vocal sounds in particular — an approach that puts processed, unstable voices next to acoustic piano and unamplified guitar rather than choosing between them.
Dust
Dust came out on 17 April 2026 through ACX: eleven songs, cut at home, from "Other World" through "Calcium", "Safeword" and "Dogbite" to the closing "Lightning". Ziyad Asrar of Whitney co-produced. The violinist Whitney Johnson arranged strings on "Calcium", which had been released as the lead single on 28 January 2026. Of that song, Balla said: "This song is about living while the world burns. I wrote it in a period of real hopelessness amidst all the suffering and hate."
He has framed the record against the band it is not. Accessory, he told Block Club Chicago ahead of release, is "looser, darker, more expressive and fluid than Dehd music, while still having an anchor in rock" — the throughline being the friction between the digital world and the way people reach each other through it.
Critics landed on the record as experimental pop rather than anything club-facing. FLOOD described a constellation of intimacy turning around love, hope, dread and melancholy, with acoustic arrangements set against gauzy guitar and piano and a lo-fi finish. Third Coast Review heard waves of distorted guitar, gentle balladry and euphoric synths under a deliberately flat vocal delivery, and folk chord shapes underneath the electronics. The record release show was at the Empty Bottle in Chicago on 26 April 2026.
Accessory XL: what happens when the band arrives
Live, the project has a separate name and a separate logic. Accessory XL is the expanded version Balla assembled from the Chicago experimental scene, drawing players from Deeper, Meat Wave, Ulna, Desert Liminal, Matchess, Bnny and TV Buddha. At a show at Cafe Bourbon Street in Columbus on 4 February 2025, with Gamma Ray and Hi Helen opening, that meant four guitarists, two drummers and a bassist on stage.
The point of the extra bodies is not volume so much as instability. Balla calls the stage arrangements "the XL versions", and described the group in early 2025 as "built to be a little more improvisational, and it's something that feels a little more alive and ephemeral" — songs reshaped by how the players individually read them rather than reproduced from the record. He has also gone back to the saxophone after a twenty-year gap, and has been putting it into unreleased material.
The scale has grown with the audience. Accessory played Thalia Hall in Chicago on 15 December 2025, a 7pm start with tickets from $30, two weeks before Balla headlined the same room with Dehd on 30 and 31 December.
Where it stands, September 2026
Since Dust, the project has been on the road under its own name rather than Dehd's. A run through Minneapolis on 18 May 2026 at 7th St Entry, with Facing and Sandpaper opening, was followed by a headline North American leg that began in the south in mid-September: Houston on 13 September, New Orleans on 14 September and Atlanta on 16 September, then Philadelphia's First Unitarian Church on 22 September, the Knockdown Center in Queens on 24 September, Sonia in Cambridge on 25 September, Bar Le 'Ritz' P.D.B. in Montréal on 26 September, the Mod Club in Toronto on 27 September and Ace of Cups in Columbus on 29 September, finishing with two nights at the Empty Bottle in Chicago on 30 September and 1 October.
A second block follows in October — Replay Lounge in Lawrence on 16 October and Opolis in Norman on 17 October — before Accessory joins Protomartyr as support for the opening West Coast stretch of that band's tour, announced on 8 July 2026. Those dates run from Crescent Ballroom in Phoenix on 19 October through San Diego, Los Angeles, San Jose, San Francisco, Seattle, Vancouver and Portland's Aladdin Theater on 29 October, after which Protomartyr continues east with different openers. Reverb Lounge in Omaha on 2 November closes Accessory's own schedule as it currently stands.
That is an unusual position for a first album cycle: headlining rooms in the 200-to-500 range in the Midwest and on the east coast, then dropping into support slots in larger West Coast venues in front of an audience that mostly knows Balla, if at all, for something louder.
The show, now
A show now is either the trio-sized touring version of Accessory or the full Accessory XL, the expanded Chicago line-up Balla assembles from Deeper, Meat Wave, Ulna, Desert Liminal, Matchess, Bnny and TV Buddha; at Cafe Bourbon Street in Columbus on 4 February 2025 that meant four guitarists, two drummers and a bassist. The set is drawn from Dust — "Calcium", "Safeword", "Sunshine", "Wherever You Are Tonight" — plus the 2025 singles "Chain Link", "UMS" and "Do You?", but Balla refers to the stage arrangements as "the XL versions" and has said the group is "built to be a little more improvisational, and it's something that feels a little more alive and ephemeral", with songs following the players' readings rather than the recorded blueprint. Expect processed vocals run through granular effects, stacked guitar feedback against piano-derived song shapes, and saxophone, which Balla picked up again after two decades. Staging is plain — no production spectacle has been reported — and Balla has been making his own visuals in parallel, including a hand-painted music video. Billing varies by leg: headline shows with local support in the Midwest and east (Facing and Sandpaper opened the 18 May 2026 show at 7th St Entry in Minneapolis; Gamma Ray and Hi Helen in Columbus in 2025), two nights at the Empty Bottle in Chicago on 30 September and 1 October 2026, then a support run in front of Protomartyr on the West Coast from 19 to 29 October 2026, where the sets will necessarily be shorter. No published reviews of the autumn 2026 shows were available at the time of writing.
Researched from blockclubchicago.org · stereogum.com · floodmagazine.com · thirdcoastreview.com · onestowatch.com · chicago.suntimes.com · matternews.org · groundcontroltouring.com