DIIV, No Joy, Sunflower Bean

DIIV is the nom-de-plume of Z. Cole Smith, musical provocateur and front-man of an atmospheric and autumnally-charged new Brooklyn four-piece.

Recently inked to the uber-reliable Captured Tracks imprint, DIIV created instant vibrations in the blog-world with their impressionistic debut Sometime; finding it's way onto the esteemed pages of Pitchfork and Altered Zones a mere matter of weeks after the group's formation.

Enlisting the aid of NYC indie-scene-luminary, Devin Ruben Perez, former Smith Westerns drummer Colby Hewitt, and Mr. Smith's childhood friend Andrew Bailey, DIIV craft a sound that is at once familial and frost-bitten. Indebted to classic kraut, dreamy Creation-records psychedelia, and the primitive-crunch of late-80's Seattle, the band walk a divisive yet perfectly fused patch of classic-underground influence.

One part THC and two parts MDMA; the first offering from DIIV chemically fuses the reminiscent with the half-remembered building a musical world out of old-air and new breeze. These are songs that remind us of love in all it's earthly perfections and perversions.

A lot of DIIV's magnetism was birthed in the process Mr. Smith went through to discover these initial compositions. After returning from a US tour with Beach Fossils, Cole made a bold creative choice, settling into the window-facing corner of a painter's studio in Bushwick, sans running water, holing up to craft his music.

In this AC-less wooden room, throughout the thick of the summer, Cole surrounded himself with cassettes and LP's, the likes of Lucinda Williams, Arthur Russell, Faust, Nirvana, and Jandek; writings of N. Scott Momaday, James Welsh, Hart Crane, Marianne Moore, and James Baldwin; and dreams of aliens, affection, spirits, and the distant natural world (as he imagined it from his window facing the Morgan L train).

The resulting music is as cavernous as it is enveloping, asking you to get lost in it's tangles in an era that demands your attention be focused into 140 characters.

"Sometime" hit stores on October 11th with a second single to follow November 29, culminating in an early March EP release.


The album bears the fruits of a band that has refined its work ethic in the gulf of time between recording sessions. The outcome – a juxtaposition of unrest and calm, beauty and chaos, truth and fantasy, in the throes of maxed-out amps and hair-whipping guitar goddess rock music – is as unwavering as ever.

Where No Joy's last album, Wait To Pleasure balanced textural differences with the freewheeling novelty of the studio environment, More Faithful documents a much more rigorous creative process and performance. For More Faithful No Joy worked with musician and producer Jorge Elbrecht (Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti, Chairlift, Lansing-Dreiden). Recording was split between tracking at Brooklyn studio Gary's Electric and an old farmhouse in Costa Rica.

In this rural Costa Rican setting, Elbrecht created a makeshift but nurturing studio environment where he and No Joy did the mixing, overdubs and cut vocals for 12 hours a day. Repairing themselves to an isolated environment strengthened No Joy's regimented approach to making a record that satisfied their vision.

There is no question that More Faithful is the most forward, throttling record No Joy has made, taking their sound to the wall in a brazen display of beauty-laced power. At times More Faithful is heavier than anything they've done yet, while also their fastest – riffs shooting upward in discord and drifting down in angelic harmonies.


In their first year, Sunflower Bean has made waves coast to coast. Julia Cumming (vox/bass), Nick Kivlen (vox/guitar), and Jacob Faber (drums), draw from a wealth of rugged lo-fi sounds, adapting the heroic charisma of VU psychedelia and Black Sabbath's dark rock to fit their own generation's drowsy ethos.

"New York is still home to bands as varied as Sunflower Bean, whose music suggests what might have happened if psychedelia had emerged after punk and the Police rather than before" – Jon Pareles of The New York Times