Personality Clash: DIIV & Been Stellar | Features

DIIV are shoegaze progenitors, a band whose catalogue has come to influence a swathe of newgen dream-pop projects. Singer Zachary Cole Smith is now based in LA, but for many those early recordings define an era in New York City where Brooklyn bloomed culturally, and DIY ethos held sway.

Been Stellar are part of a new wave of bands coming-of-age in New York City. Debut album ‘Scream From New York, NY’ is brilliant – a searing blend of noise pop and vintage indie rock tropes acting as a coming-of-age statement for five vital musicians.

CLASH paired Zachary Cole Smith with the members of Been Stellar – Sam Slocum, Nico Brunstein, Skyler Knapp, Laila Wayans, and Nando Dale – to discuss the shoegaze lineage, the struggle to make art in the modern era, and the demise of New York’s DIY spaces.

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Sam Slocum: You grew up in Connecticut, was being in the orbit of New York a big deal for you?

Zachary Cole Smith: Oh the draw is irresistible. I’d come through for shows at the Knitting Factory and hit record stores.

Skyler Knapp: We know a bit about the DIY days, like when DIIV was coming up. When we moved to New York, the last DIY venue of that crop closed a week after we got here!

ZCS: It’s funny because we came in so late, too! We played the last night at Glasslands, the last night at 285 KENT. We hit the tail end of it. We started a band because we wanted to be in that scene. We heard all the lore, we were super into it and it seemed to just vanish.

SS: Is that where DIIV came from?

ZCS: Yeah I lived in the Market Hotel. I had these demos and I needed a live band; Andrew Bailey was an old friend from when we were kids, Devin was the door guy from Monster Island. We put it together from people on the scene, just one of the advantages of there actually being a scene!

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SK: It really seems like a proper scene, and I can’t say the same for New York right now. When we started playing there were the last vestiges of that, and it felt very exclusionary. At that time, was it pretty welcoming?

ZCS: The cool thing was that there were certain venues you could go and ask for support slots. It was all different artists, like the College Class Of 2011. It didn’t matter what the sound of the band was, you’d just go to the venue. For us, we said yes to every single offer, and we’d play seven shows a week if we could. That’s what made it feel like a golden era. We had eight venues right next to each other.

SS: That just doesn’t exist right now. It’s so different. Because all those spaces shut down, it makes you long for a venue where you don’t know what’s playing, you just go.

ZCS: It’s such an important mechanism for discovering bands. Everything now is so algorithmic, or you have so much information right from the start. Shows are a cool way of just going in and discovering something new. I’m nostalgic for that. But it got priced out of New York.

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Laila Mayans: There still is a DIY thing happening here but it’s become a clique in itself, it’s almost like you have to be insanely experimental to play with them. It’s either that or really high-profile things. There’s a massive void if you do a quote unquote indie rock type of thing.

ZCS: It’s hard to know. New York is such a big place, there’s always going to be scenes. But that golden era thing that we felt such a part of… we watched it disintegrate. And we became the face of its disintegration. We played the last night at every single spot, the very end of it all… and then we moved away.

SS: You’re in LA now?

ZCS: Yeah I moved here in 2017. I came first for rehab but then I really liked it. I found a scene that I’d been looking for. Not the same as New York, but there’s a scene of shoegaze bands and shows to go to that felt exciting to me.

SS: Shoegaze is all of a sudden really massive. 

ZCS: It’s having a moment. There’s this thing happening where bands who weren’t shoegaze are getting retro-actively included. Deftones is a classic album. They’re a post-grunge, metal-adjacent band but they’re somehow seen as shoegaze pioneers. They’re really influential on shoegaze bands right now, it’s seen through a current lens. It’s an interesting genre to work in.

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SK: It can be stifling as a songwriter, in a way. You set up your pedals, but you don’t want everything to be moody and vibey all the time. I want to write pop songs, too. A lot of it was perfected in the 90s, and I worry about the future of it to some extent, as it can become an aesthetic rather than a means to convey an emotion.

ZCS: I think that’s the downside of working in an area where there are so many signifiers. I think it’s a good perspective for you to have, thinking about the song first, and then working on how shoegaze can give you different aspects. It can lead to so many emotions at once, and that’s the fun part. It’s easy to focus on the sounds, and forget about the song.

SK: It’s best when you can appreciate both extremes. I’ve been having a really big Elliott Smith moment, and it’s filled that shoegaze hole for me. He does everything I want with just his voice and an acoustic guitar.

ZCS: Oh I’m a huge fan. He took so much from classic songwriting, like his big influences are Elton John and Big Star.

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SS: One thing I’ve wondered about DIIV is how much of an influence New York City was on you?

ZCS: It’s funny, if you listen to a quintessential New York band like Television or Lydia Lunch, they didn’t actually come from New York. And from a certain vantage point that’s a kind of cultural tourism, but it’s come to define the city. For us, people didn’t know where we were from, we just played every fucking show we could. It’s not so much the city itself influencing us, but more being a product of the scene, and really wanting to be a part of it. I don’t think the character of the music became part of the character of the music in the way it did for Television or Sonic Youth or whoever.

SS: It’s weird, we moved to New York because we wanted to make New York music. But as time has gone on and you read all about it, you realise these bands weren’t living out a mythos, they were just trying to build their own thing. It makes me curious about what New York will be like in the future; everyone is struggling to get by, it’s so hard to make art and live here.

ZCS: I don’t think it’s unique to New York, but the barriers to making music have become more and more impossible to get past. It’s such a dangerous, slippery slope when the only people who can make music are people who have money. It limits what music can be, and the role that it serves. On one hand it’s a New York thing but really it’s about the streaming economy, and how it’s become impossible for people to make a living. And that’s scary.

Featured in CLASH Issue 128. Been Stellar will be supporting Fontaines D.C. on tour later this year.

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