Chasing Fridays: DIIV Q&A, Contrast Attitude, Zastava, more
Six reviews, a crazy-ass live show recap, and a powerful Q&A with a shoegaze titan.
As you may have noticed, I didn't publish a Chasing Fridays last week. There was no real reason for that other than I was busy in the evenings (I hit four shows in five days) and preoccupied with other work outside of this here blog. Sorry to those who missed me, but to make up for it, I'm returning this week with an extra-long edition of Chasing Fridays. This one's got my thoughts on two singles, an EP, a split, an album, and a compilation; a live report from one of the crazy-ass hardcore shows I saw last week; and an amazing Q&A, if I do say so myself, with DIIV frontperson Cole Smith.
Eli Enis
Oh, and in case you missed it, I published my mid-year report earlier this week. I culled together my favorite and least favorite releases of 2025 thus far, which reminded me just how many awesome records have dropped during the first two quarters. There were also a few clunkers, but you'll have to subscribe for access behind the paywall in order to see what I included in that section. My takedowns aren't charity work.
The Regulars - The Regulars I
The year was 1985. Dinosaur Jr., then still just Dinosaur, were a ragtag group of hardcore ex-pats trying to make Neil Young sound punk. Hüsker Dü were furthering their transformation from land speed record holders to belt-sander rawk songsmiths. Screaming Trees barely existed. Pixies literally didn't exist. Punk was dead for the second time and "grunge" was just a word for bathtub residue. If I told you that a little-known band innocuously named The Regulars put out an EP that year, and Bruce Pavitt raved about in his Sub Pop zine, and they almost signed to SST but never got a phone call back from Greg Ginn, so oh well, they just released it on some other tiny imprint and then got buried in the sands of time until some local historian dredged it out of his collection and uploaded it to YouTube in 2015, and nine people in the comments enthusiastically affirmed that, yes, The Regulars were great, and it's such a shame they never made it out of their local scene, and this EP is such a criminally overlooked gem – if all that was true, would you believe it?
I would. And I'd be fooled. The Regulars are not a band from 1985. They're a band from now, who live in Philadelphia, who are signed to Julia's War Recordings, and who sound like they should've been on SST Records in 1985. The songs on The Regulars 1 are weary and tattered in a way that feels anachronistic compared to all the other weary and tattered bands coming out of Philly right now. They sound like they emerged via a portal from 40 years ago, back before grunge resuscitated and, arguably, ruined Punk Rock. Before indie-rock bands sounded like they were self-consciously performing the role of "indie-rock band." Before every alt-rock band became either an homage or a backlash to some other alt-rock band. The irony is that The Regulars are masterful pilferers of Jag & Jazzmaster & J. Mascis history. Ironic because they sound like they could've invented everything they're stealing from.
Zastava - Buildings
We at Chasing Sundays love an organic rise, and I've been seeing a lot of admiration for this record out on the timeline this week. Zastava are a Detroit post-punk band and Buildings is their debut album. If I were to reduce post-punk, a sprawling umbrella term for rock deconstructionists working within a punk ethos, to its most archetypal and recognizable form – chilly, arch, angular, monotone, literate – then Zastava not only meet that criteria, but exemplify its greatest appeals.
The guitars on Buildings are itchy and brooding, the vocals agitated. There's plenty of tension in the songwriting, and just as crucially, plenty of release. Whether he's dashing away from apathy in "Running" or croaking "goodnight" in "Truth," vocalist Mateja Matic sounds consumed in his subject matter – none of that detached coolness that spoils great bands like Zastava. In lieu of reheating the same stale reference points from 1979, I'll compare Buildings to the muddy sloshings of Brooklyn's Kal Marks, the fatigued whippings of Pittsburgh's Silver Car Crash, and the bullseye precision of Cincinnati's The Drin.
Various Artists - Paradigms II
Marjorine
Brooklyn label PFR Records put out this interesting comp of nine bands I've never heard of – from Tokyo, Stockholm, Honolulu, NYC, and elsewhere – who all play some variety of shoegaze or post-punk. What I like about this comp is that it's neither puritanical about genre nor era. Snakey Dublay's contribution evokes vintage Factory Records drabness, while GC Candy's song, "Brita Filter," is an earth-mulching grunge-gaze tune that sounds like surefire chum for the Fleshwater sharks.
Throughout the last decade, shoegaze has been uprooted from its birthplace (U.K. in 1988) and replanted in America circa 1998 – right alongside slowcore, alt-metal, and second-wave grunge. That reimagination of shoegaze's genealogy has allowed the genre to evolve and mutate in so many phenomenal ways, but it's important to remember shoegaze's actual origins – as an outgrowth of goth and post-punk. Intentionally or not, by placing the sumptuous psych-gaze of Japan's Yuètù right alongside Dry Faser's honky-tonk post-punk, Paradigms II subtly mends the cracks between these fractured idioms of effects-laden guitar heroism.
9million - "Creation"
You never know what you're going to get from 9million. The Toronto band's last two dispatches alternated between burly alt-rock and ethereal dream-pop. "Creation" is a mix of both. The riffs have the low-end heaviness of Starflyer 59 and Swervedriver, so you can file "Creation" into your "shoegaze with truck nuts" playlist. However, don't let the Van Halen-sized solo guarding the entryway dissuade you from stepping inside and witnessing the misty male-femme vocal harmonies that ground so many of the best 9million tracks. Most shoegaze bands either want to drive a wrecking ball through your wall or give you something to curl up on the couch about. 9million understand that the best shoegaze balances those scales. Play "Creation" loud enough to rumble a book off your shelf, but the svelte verses will ensure the whole furniture piece doesn't come crashing down.
High./All Under Heaven - Split
It's always awkward when the better song on the split is the one with worse mixing. All Under Heaven and High. are two New Jersey shoegaze bands who sit somewhere in the middle of the spectrum between grunge-gaze and Normal Shoegaze. All Under Heaven's track, "Moving On," has some killer riffing during its third act, but the vocals – like a lot of 'gaze in their milieu, which I've written about to death on this site – cut it too close to Balance & Composure for my liking. I lived through the early 2010s and simply don't have nostalgia for alt-rock from that era, which is why so many bands in All Under Heaven's corner (Leaving Time, Downward, ASkySoBlack) do very little for me.
A lot of High.'s music isn't all that different. A solid half of their January EP – one of the best 'gaze releases of the year – could be sorted into the overstuffed grunge-gaze folder, but what differentiates them from the pack is their appreciation for dingy atmosphere. They've figured out how to sound powerful without sounding expensive: keeping the guitars a little mucky, the vocals a little shrill, the playing a little loose. And it certainly doesn't hurt that their melodies are A-tier. "Someone You Adore" lowkey sounds like crap coming in after the pristine shine of All Under Heaven's "Moving On," but once your ears adjust to the lower fidelity, High.'s songwriting – the seasick beat, the piercing feedback squalls, the yearning chorus – is so much more gratifying to get lost in.
Halloween - "Spiral Staircase"
Halloween are one band from the Philly shoegaze scene who I've never seen live and never really took the time to listen to – until this week, when they announced a new album and their signing to Funeral Party Records (Whirr, Luster). I gave this new track "Spiral Staircase" five separate listens before determining that I simply don't like it. It's the kind of song that might make more sense within the context of a full album, but as a standalone single, it feels like a confused slurry of gauzy, stormy psych-gaze without a hook, a climax, a lyrical motif, or really any semblance of a musical concept holding it together. So many bands want to be Spirit of the Beehive without realizing that what makes that band special isn't the warped samples, the disaffected monotone, and the rampant chorus pedal abuse. It's how they use those accoutrements to refract what are, at their core, Beatlesesque pop tunes. There's no pop tune at the center of "Spiral Staircase." There's nothing.
Contrast Attitude, Physique, Vitriolic Response, Ultimatum @ The Rox Lab
The best shows I've ever been to are the ones that catch me off guard. The ones where I show up without any real expectations and leave feeling like I just saw seven shooting stars criss-crossing the night sky in tandem. This show was like eight shooting stars. I came to this gig at the recommendation of an older friend who queued me into Contrast Attitude, a highly respected Japanese d-beat band who rarely make it abroad. Seattle fast-core crushers Physique were also on this bill, and I thought their 2023 LP on Iron Lung was pretty cool. I showed up to the space – a small afterschool science center in an economically disadvantaged neighborhood of Pittsburgh – a half hour before music started and there were already a hundred studded crust punks swilling beer out front. For those who know about Pittsburgh's crust mecca Skull Fest, that was the vibe.
Video courtesy of Profane Existence Instagram
The first band, Ultimatum, featured a couple members of legendary Pittsburgh crust bands Aus-Rotten and Caustic Christ. Their set began with a compilation of sound bites about the atrocities in Gaza, and then as soon as the music started, a couple beer cans whizzed through the air, narrowly dodging the replica planets that were hanging from the ceiling. The crowd reaction was tame but the band were good. Next up was Vitriolic Response, a quintet of Northern English blokes from Manchester who played classic d-beat with a dash of metallic churn. They looked and behaved like if the cast of What We Do In the Shadows were crust punks, pausing between songs to lightly bicker, swig beer, and beg the room to buy merch so they could afford "diesel" for the next day's haul. The crowd was a bit more active, but not at all indicative of what would happen during the next two bands.
coryplaysbass
After an unusually long changeover period, Physique's feedback beckoned the sweaty masses back into the room and the guitarist explained that they had totaled their van just an hour before and only made it to the show because a benevolent friend rescued them from the roadside. The crowd made sure that their presence was appreciated. It didn't take long for the room to split in half as spiked-jacket slam-dancers began pummeling. The pitting was strictly old-school side-to-sideing; not the usual swinging and spin-kicking that I write about here, but equally feral and liable to cause damage. After the first song I glanced down at my wrist and noticed a two-inch long scrape that was gleaming red from the excess perspiration. A battlejacket must've snagged me, but I had fist-pumping to do so I paid it no mind. Physique's set was over and done in a brisk yet furious 10-minute sprint. The microphone clipped the whole time and one of the guitars battled a bad cable connection, but that didn't matter. It was gloriously cathartic.
Cumnuts
Physique were fucking awesome, but Contrast Attitude wiped the floor. The trio were discordant and unhinged, but the songs were rockin' and I actually went home with a few chant-along lyrics stuck in my head. A who's who of local musicians – members of Illiterates, Speed Plans, Concealed Blade, and many others – were grinning widely the whole time, affirming just how special the ongoing chaos was. In the middle of the set, someone yanked a ladder off the back wall and planted it in the center of the pit (see above video). One of the guys from Ultimatum – a man who appeared over 40, mind you – scaled to the top, balanced precariously, and then did a wrestling body slam into the hooting scrimmage below. Several more people took the nine-foot leap and the band played on like they didn't even notice. The bedlam was cinematically surreal. The beers flinging. The fists cranking. The moshers bashing. The band ripping. Fuck it: nine shooting stars.
Chasing Down
Cole Smith
of
DIIV
Chasing Down is a Q&A series with artists, friends, and others of good taste.
DIIV have had a helluva year. Roughly one year ago, the Brooklyn band released their great, long-awaited fourth album, Frog In Boiling Water, a provocatively political, exploratively shoegaze-ish concept record with one of the coolest visual-textual accompaniments of any album this decade. They spent the remainder of 2024 touring with a rogue's gallery of cutting-edge shoegaze talent, solidifying their role as founding fathers of the American shoegaze renaissance. Then, at the top of this year, DIIV frontman Cole Smith lost his entire home to the California wildfires, an immense tragedy for him and his family that dramatically altered his perspective on music – both as a listener and a maker.
DIIV's new single, "Return of Youth," was written long before the fires, but its lyrics took on an eerily prescient new meaning after that event, and its heartbreaking video, depicting footage of the devastation that was wrought upon Smith's home turf, is powerfully affecting. For this edition of Chasing Down, I asked Smith about how that misfortune has reshaped his relationship with the music he listens to and plays. I find his answers to those difficult questions to be immensely moving. I also asked him some light-hearted queries: his thoughts on Alex G's "Afterlife" (Smith is, like me, a giant Alex G head), his favorite electronic releases of late, and how the next DIIV record is coming together. Read the full Q&A below.
What was the last song or album you heard that made you go, "Fuck, this is what music is all about..."?
Airplanes do this to me, but I had a pretty moving experience with Syro on our big long flight to Australia for this tour. To me, I was hearing what sounded like a person who loves making music so much that they decided to try and basically reinvent music from scratch. There’s fun in it, and obsession, and excitement, and I could hear all at once the best parts of what making music feels like in there. It’s such an alien-sounding record but I guess my experience was hearing how much humanity lives in it too.