DIIV

cow - zachary cole smith (sparklehorse)

Wed, 12 Jul 2017 14:58:44 -0400

cow - zachary cole smith (sparklehorse)

Rochester, NY, June 2014, photo by Sandy Kim

Thu, 25 May 2017 13:24:43 -0400

Rochester, NY, June 2014, photo by Sandy Kim

icehead - zachary cole smith (alex g)

Tue, 18 Apr 2017 13:33:51 -0400

icehead - zachary cole smith (alex g)

At long last our album is streaming via The Guardian! Thanks to everyone involved. I hope you enjoy...

Fri, 29 Jan 2016 13:21:49 -0500

At long last our album is streaming via The Guardian! Thanks to everyone involved. I hope you enjoy it. Please enjoy it. xo -c

Just Announced! DIIV @ Market Hotel in Brooklyn, NY - March 5th

Thu, 28 Jan 2016 19:26:34 -0500

Just Announced! DIIV @ Market Hotel in Brooklyn, NY - March 5th

Just Announced! DIIV @ Market Hotel in Brooklyn, NY - March 4th

Thu, 28 Jan 2016 19:21:09 -0500

Just Announced! DIIV @ Market Hotel in Brooklyn, NY - March 4th

Just Announced! DIIV @ Market Hotel in Brooklyn, NY - March 3rd

Thu, 28 Jan 2016 19:16:13 -0500

Just Announced! DIIV @ Market Hotel in Brooklyn, NY - March 3rd

Just Announced! DIIV @ Independent in San Francisco, CA -...

Thu, 28 Jan 2016 19:06:00 -0500

Just Announced! DIIV @ Independent in San Francisco, CA - February 28th

Just Announced! DIIV @ The Echo in Los Angeles, CA - February...

Thu, 28 Jan 2016 18:40:44 -0500

Just Announced! DIIV @ The Echo in Los Angeles, CA - February 24th

Just Announced! DIIV @ The Echo in Los Angeles, CA - February...

Thu, 28 Jan 2016 18:35:34 -0500

Just Announced! DIIV @ The Echo in Los Angeles, CA - February 23rd

Just Announced! DIIV @ The Echo in Los Angeles, CA - February...

Thu, 28 Jan 2016 18:31:04 -0500

Just Announced! DIIV @ The Echo in Los Angeles, CA - February 22nd

Just Announced! DIIV @ White Oak Music Hall in Houston, TX - May...

Thu, 28 Jan 2016 02:20:25 -0500

Just Announced! DIIV @ White Oak Music Hall in Houston, TX - May 29th

Hey. Our new LP “Is The Is Are” is out soon, so...

Thu, 21 Jan 2016 18:47:57 -0500

Hey. Our new LP “Is The Is Are” is out soon, so around its release we’ve announced a series of album release shows in NYC, SF, and LA. We are doing short residencies at The Echo and the famed Market Hotel, as well as two Noise Pop shows in SF, with a poster designed by the always great @nickgazin

LOS ANGELES

2/23, 2/24, 2/25 @ The Echo

SAN FRANCISCO

2/27 @ Brick and Mortar for Noise Pop

2/28 @ The Independent for Noise Pop

NEW YORK

3/3, ¾, 3/5 @ Market Hotel

So, in honor of these shows, we’re sharing the title track off our new album, “Is The Is Are”, right here:

This song was the last song I wrote for this record. I wrote it even after the rest of the record had already been recorded! I felt like something was missing from the record, that it needed an upbeat, propulsive, and vocal-driven song to kick off the 2nd LP. This is the rare DIIV song that doesn’t rely on a hooky guitar melody, but rather relies on a vocal melody and a propulsive bassline. This song was inspired by my experience recreating Neu!’s “Hallogallo” for a Noisey documentary on Krautrock. I was heavily inspired by the process behind the song. All the lead guitars on the track came from just me playing melodies over the song, as I would with any other song, but then we took the whole guitar track and flipped it backwards. Then, we did the same thing again! I recently read an interview with Michael Rother of Neu! in Tape Op magazine while waiting in line at a customs check in Berlin, months and months after the album was already submitted, and he talked about the recording process of “Hallogallo” and he said they basically did the same thing, playing melodies over the track and then flipping them backwards, but he said that they played their parts over an extended 30-minute version of the song and that their producer Connie Plank took their guitar parts and chopped them up to include his favorite bits, and I remember thinking, “aw man, I wish I had thought of doing that.” Anyway, I like the song the way it is.

The lyrics on this track are pretty intense, they’re included above. Kind of about finding yourself in vastly different, often paradoxical headspaces at various stages throughout addiction and recovery. One paradox is that while you’re out on the street killing yourself, you can be feeling real good; while the process of ‘getting better’ is an extremely long and painful experience, though one that can also be extremely life-affirming.

This is the title track for our record “Is The Is Are” – the song title came from the album title. A lot of people have asked about the reasoning behind having such a nonsensical title. So I guess I should try and explain it. Basically, I wanted something slightly disorienting, that felt homemade and imperfect, easy to criticize, something that made the reader feel like they weren’t grasping my intent, like I was being misunderstood, because I’ve felt so misunderstood throughout the entirety of DIIV’s existence. I wanted a title that wasn’t taken from a lyric on the album, or from the title of the album’s lead single, like they usually are. I didn’t want to name our second album “2″. I always feel like, if there’s an opportunity to be creative, there’s no reason not to use it. I wanted the title to come straight from the album art. I was really inspired by Concrete Poetry from the 60′s, poetry that took a visual form and was as much visual art as it was poetry. I loved Tom Philips “A Humument”. I wanted the title to come from a poem. Another random inspiration was from the internet – I got a lot of laughs from these two specific internet memes. One was “Has anyone really been far as decided to use even go want to do look more like?”, and another was “I accidentally 93MB of rar files”. I felt like language had a specific type of power when it was misused. I wanted something that felt profound, but upon closer inspection was meaningless. I reached out to a poet/artist I found in Paris named Frederick Deming who I thought would totally understand where I was coming from. His comics, called Bizaroids, seemed to totally fit with the direction I wanted to go with this album art and title. I told him about “A Humement” and about “Has anyone really…” and wrote a few sample poems, and told him to go crazy. I felt like English being his second language would add another dimension to the poetry. Within a week, he sent me over 30 poems, and what he came up with couldn’t have been more perfect. Here are some poems he sent:

Together is am above.
We is the us.
Where am to be we.

—–

Black is practic
Licking my thigh
For go there for 44

——

Star route buss trout
Piolet no use, camping ha ha ?
Lights crew 321 ?

—–

So with so you you see?
Bring we bring us with we.
Am are you be.

A bunch of these are included in the album art, on the printed eurosleeves, hand-lettered by Frederick and superimposed on top of paintings by Joji Nakamura, while even more are included in the special edition art, which includes a 32-page chapbook of Frederick’s drawings and more of his poems. The poem that I chose to take the album title from was the one I felt like fit the project the best:

Hear is their.
Story, we is you .
Is the is are.

I got this poem in an email from Frederick, and probably less than an hour after I got that email, I had already announced the album title. For me, this line just jumped off the page. I didn’t really have to think about it. I knew what I wanted, and this was it. Hopefully this whole thing will help explain where the title and the poem and the concept and everything all came from… Thanks to Frederick and also to Joji and Hyto who worked really hard on making all the art that makes up the package of “Is The Is Are”. If you can, please try to order the vinyl here: http://www.omnianmusicgroup.com/products/is-the-is-are

Thanks.

-Cole

Just Announced! DIIV @ Brick & Mortar in San Francisco, CA -...

Thu, 14 Jan 2016 07:15:30 -0500

Just Announced! DIIV @ Brick & Mortar in San Francisco, CA - February 27th

Just Announced! DIIV @ Bowery Ballroom in New York, NY -...

Fri, 18 Dec 2015 05:20:24 -0500

Just Announced! DIIV @ Bowery Ballroom in New York, NY - December 31st

I feel like when discussing this album, a lot has been made of...

Mon, 14 Dec 2015 13:53:52 -0500

I feel like when discussing this album, a lot has been made of its relationship to drugs, and my own personal relationship with drugs. I’ve talked about it in the press as openly as I can because it is so important for me that this album register to people as being as true and as honest and as rooted in reality as possible.

approaching the subject of drugs in art, on a rock and roll album especially, is a special kind of complicated. the drug issues of so many archetypal rock stars have been so glamorized for so many decades, while also throughout history variously registering as being one of rock and roll’s most thoroughly exhausted clichés.

in discussing my own history openly and completely, I hoped to remove any attempt at seeming “cool” or “glamorous” and tried instead to totally humanize it. If you’ve watched the end of “Montage of Heck” or listened to Elliott Smith playing live at the Riviera theatre in Chicago (or lots of other late-era live Elliott), you probably don’t see Kurt or Elliott’s drug issues as being anything other than what they were: just plain sad. Addicts are sick people.

But I never wanted this record to be mired too deep in darkness either. My life wasn’t all drugs and addiction, rehab/relapse, and sickness. I also met and fell in love with someone.

On “Dopamine”, i say about Sky “you’re the sun and I was your cloud”, which is literally how I felt so many times we were together, and her name kinda made the metaphor feel doubly appropriate. I guess I also kinda carried it over to “Under the Sun” which deep down is just a love song, meant to be moment of levity amongst the heaviness of a lot of the rest of the record. No matter where you are, no matter what happens, I’m here. I don’t think I would have made it out if it weren’t for love. Not really sure what else to say.

here are the lyrics:

yes i’ll come back to you
no i wont ask where you run
under the sun
Yes I’ll catch up to you
Then I’ll ask what have we done
Under the sun
To be free, be awake
big breath you can’t fake
once you’ve begun
press my face to the back
all the pillars that stack
and hold up the sun

listen here:

https://soundcloud.com/capturedtracks/diiv-under-the-sun-official-single

Just Announced! DIIV @ Heaven in London, United Kingdom - March...

Tue, 08 Dec 2015 02:20:20 -0500

Just Announced! DIIV @ Heaven in London, United Kingdom - March 18th

NYC I-D Magazine Outtake, October 2015, photo by Zachary Chick

Tue, 24 Nov 2015 15:38:59 -0500

NYC I-D Magazine Outtake, October 2015, photo by Zachary Chick

Just Announced! DIIV @ St Jerome’s Laneway Festival in...

Mon, 23 Nov 2015 13:30:51 -0500

Just Announced! DIIV @ St Jerome’s Laneway Festival in Fremantle, Australia - February 14th

humility: DIIV WITH Sky Ferreira <3

Sun, 22 Nov 2015 20:39:33 -0500

humility:

DIIV WITH Sky Ferreira