Client: Wonderland.
“The first album, Oshin, was about water, if the second was about fire, people would be like, ‘What the fuck? This doesn’t make any sense’,” says Zachary Cole Smith, singer of DIIV, who goes by his middle name rather than his first. He’s got a point.
Over the past two years, Cole has publicly wrestled with drug addiction following his high profile arrest for heroin possession alongside his girlfriend Sky Ferreira, before a gig in New York state. Predictably, the media dragged the couple’s names through the muck. Smith went to ground, entering rehab (though not completing it) and channeling his energy into DIIV’s forthcoming double record, Is The Is Are. “Making something honest and personal, taking everything that happened and running with it. I wanted to make something powerful and potentially transcendent. I saw it as a rebirth, to change the conversation from people talking about everything but the music, to finally talking about the music again.”
Taylor Glasby 