Drunk Dial Records Dot Com
Turning my love for a boutique garage-punk 7" label into a website
I have been collecting records for coming up on 7 years now. I didn’t start out looking for a hobby, all I felt was that streaming music didn’t feel substantial enough. I hadn’t figured out going to shows yet, but I felt a strong desire to have some sort of tangible connection to the music I was so passionate about. I don’t think I had ever been inside of a legit record store, or even owned a fully-functioning record player, I just started picking the colorful vinyl option at pre-order time.
Simultaneously I had just made the (questionable) decision to create an Instagram account. A desperate attempt to mimic what I thought a normal early 20s man with friends would probably do. I didn’t exactly know what you were supposed to post on instagram, but somehow the first thing I thought of was a hit, and the feedback loop was intrenched.
Suffice to say, I was hooked. For better or for worse, I have amassed hundreds of plastic circles, took a few hundred photos of me holding plastic circles, and discussed the merits of specific plastic circles for a considerable portion of the last decade. Despite my current feelings on the state of the vinyl record “industry”, and my waning spirit for sharing things on evil ad platforms—posting records on Instagram has connected me with many great people, and a fuck ton of incredible music.
Jordan (of Drunk Dial Records) and I first got in contact sometime during covid, when he was running promo for Drunk Dial #7. Careful was the artist, a pseudonym for Dave Williams: professional Canadian, member of a million incredible bands, most notably–Crusades. This was a really cool release, and so I bought all three.
Jordan is one of the best people I have met through my time on the ‘gram, and the 7” releases from his boutique punk label are some of my favorite things in my collection. It helps that we share a very similar music taste (think Jay Reatard, The Exploding Hearts, and Dark Thoughts) but the songs that get pressed to these smaller plastic circles? All bangers. The art is fantastic, they sell for $8, what’s not to love?
All of that is to say, at some point a couple years ago, Jordan was complaining about what a pain it is to keep his Squarespace website up to date, or nicely formatted, and I, always looking for a side project, entertained the idea of building a new website for Drunk Dial. I got sidetracked with life and forgot about it (for well over a year) until last Christmas when I had a week of PTO and inspiration to burn.
I wanted to build a simple static website, nothing fancy. Lightweight, minimal javascript, but elegant, and tailored specifically to archiving a catalog of records. I understand why it happens, but it’s a bit of a pet peeve when the only web presence a record label has is their storefront and social media.
I started with some sketches. and then went to work scraping all of the assets I could find.
I had built my previous personal website using Eleventy, and while I enjoyed the experience, it eventually got frustrating having to roll every single component myself. I wanted something a little easier to maintain and a little more batteries included this time around. Especially if I was going to host and keep this running for someone else.
I decided I would go with Astro, and boy that was a good decision. What a joy to work with. I might write more about it at some point as I later rewrote this very website you are reading right now with Astro—but now that I think about it, there is nothing worse than a blog with nothing but posts about how the person built their blog. No one cares.
So without further ado, here are a bunch of screen shots, or you can just go visit https://drunkdialrecords.com
Matt K. Shrugg does all of the layout, logos, and lettering for the Drunk Dial Releases, so I was able to convert some of those assets to lovely scalable SVGs.
The bottom credits are pretty iconic to the drunk dial releases, and I wanted to try and incorporate that into the site design somehow. I figured I would take the liberties of adding my own tag.
A late addition was updating the font. I had Jordan track down the font that Matt uses for the back label (Avenir Next Heavy) but since it was a commercial font, I found the closest open source font I could in Montserrat. I am pretty happy with how close it looks!
For a label producing small batches of 7” records I felt it necessary to add all of the specific pressing information, as well as a link to the release on Discogs. After each release Drunk Dial conducts an interview with the artist, and I think that’s pretty cool context, so I made sure it was nicely formatted.
Super fun project. It inspired me to take up recreating this here website as I said, and I have been having a lot of fun hacking on small web projects since. Hopefully more to come!
