The Ghost Club

Every puzzle comprises pieces of different shapes and sizes meant to interlock in all of the right places. Music forms in a similar fashion for The Ghost Club—yet founder Domenic Dunegan even personally shapes the pieces by hand. The Pittsburgh, PA singer, songwriter, producer, and multi-instrumentalist conjoins dusky analog synths, arena-ready guitars, and energetic vocals in a pastiche of eras and styles spawned by the eighties and forged in the twenty-twenties.

“With music, each sound is a very small piece of the puzzle for me,” he explains. “From start to finish, a lot of time goes into it. Eventually, the puzzle gets done, but you need every single one of those pieces for the whole.”

In 2016, Domenic recognized the power of music. His dad took him to a Bruce Springsteen concert, and he left with his life changed. As a film student, a heavy workload took precedence, but he kept thinking about music, nevertheless. By 2018, he started to write and record songs of his own, and The Ghost Club was born. Dunegan met producer Matt Squire [Panic! At The Disco, Ariana Grande] through Facebook, and the pair cooked up a batch of tunes together. “This Bird Has Flown” eclipsed 3.6 million Spotify streams, while “Antique” gathered 2.5 million streams. An ironic post on Reddit captioned, “Hey, here’s a video my band made, and it kind of flopped,” kickstarted intrigue around “Same Graves.” Eventually, that track amassed 11 million Spotify streams and more than 1 million YouTube views, while New Noise Magazine likened him to “blues-y pop rock artists like Panic! At The Disco and IDKHOW.”

Since 2020, Dunegan has teamed up with producer Eric Palmquist [Bad Suns, Thrice, Half Alive]. Beyond playing everything but drums, Domenic started writing on guitar by posing a question, “What would ‘Dancing in the Dark’ sound like if it was written today?”

In the end, The Ghost Club delivers anthems that are as infectious as they are intriguing—just the kind of enigma alternative music needs. “We all can feel very lonely when we think it’s just us,” he leaves off. “If it can be anything, I want the music to be a reminder that you’re not alone.”