Dehd guitarist Jason Balla finds new creative life in his experimental solo project, Accessory
Thalia Hall and Jason Balla are going to become very good friends this month. On Dec. 30-31, the guitarist/singer of Chicago’s popular DIY band Dehd will take the stage for the band’s Bye Bye ’25 NYE Run.
Two weeks prior, on Dec. 15, he’ll warm things up with a show featuring his other artistic project, Accessory, one that has found renewed purpose in recent months.
“It’s always kind of been happening, but my life is so chaotic and busy, it’s been quietly existing in the background,” the Buffalo Grove native admitted of his solo effort. It first materialized in 2018 with a handful of one-off singles and Balla using the guise of Accessory to symbolize “a companion.”
In November, Balla released the latest material, a pair of diffused shoegazey singles, “UMS” and “Do You?” — the result of getting a self-made recording studio in his Little Village apartment up and running and finally being able to catch his breath.
Busy truly is too soft of a word to describe Balla’s life in 2025, making it a heroic feat that he’s been able to advance on Accessory at all.
Dehd is still riding high off its 2024 Fat Possum record “Poetry.” And with his bandmates, drummer Eric McGrady and bassist/vocalist Emily Kempf, Balla toured hard this year, opening for the likes of Japanese Breakfast, Modest Mouse and Flaming Lips and returning home to make a Riot Fest debut in September.
“[Riot] felt like the culmination of our whole two years of touring our last record and all the ways that we've grown as a band,” said Balla. “It was pretty monumental for us.”
During the Douglass Park set, Dehd performed numbers like “Bad Love” and “Mood Ring” in typical minimalistic splendor. But Balla and Kempf notably made other noise by condemning the actions of federal immigration enforcement agents who had just launched Operation Midway Blitz.
The matter felt personal for Balla, whose Little Village neighborhood has been a frequent target of the activity. “It’s been really hard,” the musician said. “I did training for the community groups … I would hear helicopters and get on my bike and try to go help. But then it would be over and you just kind of see the weird remnants and normal life happening right next to it.”
The juxtaposition was almost too much to bear for the songwriter who often waxes about the human experience and the emotional responses that come with it.
“It almost made me feel like what's the point of making music right now because there's like such bigger fish to fry. But the flipside of it is the thing that you do also brings a lot of joy and community.”
That duality also inspired and translated into Balla’s newer material for Accessory, particularly on an as-yet unreleased and unannounced body of work he’s been tinkering with the past couple years. “I’ve been surrounded with everything happening in Gaza and taking on the suffering of huge amounts of people from across the world. … I don’t know if as people we’re built to take on so much,” he lamented.
But at the same time the heaviness permeated, Balla was moved by a moment of human compassion and empathy that came from an unlikely source. “When Steve Albini passed away and people were sharing a bunch of stuff about him,” Balla began, “there was a random clip of a message he had recorded for a friend of his kid who was having a hard time fitting in at school, and it was so beautiful and pure and unpretentious. It was just a human caring and being tender.”
Balla only interacted with Albini briefly during a session at the audio engineer’s production business, Electrical Audio, but he learned by osmosis, tapping into a style of analog deconstruction techniques and a community of local musicians that would have made the late Albini proud. One example: On the road, Accessory expands into Accessory XL, making room for an expanded lineup that pulls from Chicago acts Deeper, Desert Liminal, Matchess, Bnny, TV Buddha and Meat Wave to help pad out Balla’s layered sounds live.
“Dehd does our one thing super well, but this [the XL troupe] is my opportunity to kind of explore all these other areas and collaborate. You wind up learning a lot more as a musician because there are all these different voices and personalities,” Balla shared. “And they've all definitely made me a much better musician and more adventurous too.”
That spirit coaxed him into playing saxophone on upcoming Accessory material for the first time since he was 16 and quit the Buffalo Grove High School band. “It was really unchallenging,” he recalled. “And when I heard modern rock and roll music, I was like, what am I doing wasting my time sitting at these pep band rallies?” he joked.
While avant garde and experimentation has always been Balla’s signature — you’ll never find a straightforward adjective describing his sound — he continues to push limits with his curiosity and hands-on tactile nature. In this interview, he talked about soldering his home studio and building his own preamps and compressors to help him self-produce more of his own works and that of other bands, while also adding that he’s expanding his art skills. Balla has typically always created the artwork for Dehd albums; he has taken up that mantle for Accessory, too.
“It might be too ambitious but I’m actually in the middle of painting a new music video,” he shared. “I'm already 200 frames in.” The effort may sideline his holidays, but 2026 is already on his creative brain. “I’m planning on putting a lot of things into the world,” he teased of another busy year ahead.