DIIV

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