Mistletone

Artwork by Carl Breitkreuz

DIIV TOUR DATES:

Saturday 30 January: Laneway Singapore @ The Meadow, Gardens By The Bay, Singapore
Monday, 1st February: Laneway Auckland @ Silo Park, Auckland
Friday, 5th February: Laneway Adelaide @ Harts Mill, Adelaide
Saturday, 6th February: Laneway Brisbane @ Brisbane Showgrounds, Bowen Hills
Sunday, 7th February: Laneway Sydney @ Sydney College Of The Arts, Rozelle
Tuesday, 9th February: SYDNEY: Factory Theatre with special guests Step-Panther. Tickets on sale now from the venue.
Thursday, 11th February: MELBOURNE: The Corner with special guests Totally Mild + Crepes. Tickets on sale now from the venue.
Saturday, 13th February: Laneway Melbourne @ Footscray Community Arts Centre, Melbourne
Sunday, 14th February: Laneway Fremantle @ Esplanade Reserve and West End, Fremantle

Mistletone, Triple R and FBi proudly present the first ever Australian tour by hazy Brooklyn guitar band DIIV. come to our shores for Laneway Festival plus side shows in Sydney & Melbourne (dates above, plus Laneway Festival on sale now from here), armed with a hotly anticipated new album and a dreamlike alchemy of sound, built from swirling guitars, transportive textures and transcendental pop songs.

DIIV recently shared their heady new single “Dopamine” from Is The Is Are, their highly anticipated sophomore album for esteemed NYC label Captured Tracks. “Dopamine” is an ecstatic expansion on DIIV’s dream pop / shoegaze stylings, and a mouth-watering taster for fans hooked on the headrush that DIIV’s trademark smoky, spiralling pop delivers straight to the adrenal glands.

DIIV is the nom-de-plume of Z. Cole Smith, musical provocateur and front-man of an atmospheric and autumnally-charged Brooklyn four-piece. Signed to the uber-reliable Captured Tracks imprint, DIIV created instant vibrations in the blog-world with their impressionistic debut Sometime; finding its 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 its 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 LPs, 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 its tangles in an era that demands your attention be focused into 140 characters.