Diamond Day Unveils New Album, Connect The Dots
Diamond Day has unveiled their debut album, Connect The Dots, a hypnotic and shoegaze alt-pop fever dream. With Rosier’s Béatrix Méthé and Grammy-nominated Quinn Bachand at the helm, the Montréal duo enlist a dream pop A-team–including Jorge Elbrecht (known for his work with Japanese Breakfast and Wild Nothing) and feeble little horse’s Sebastian Kinsler–to synthesize their expansive aesthetic over 10 dreamy tracks.
Béatrix’s haunting vocals soar through the band’s retro-futuristic musical ether, flowing through the record’s themes; identity, heredity, mental health, death, and rebirth. These topics sparkle through otherworldly soundscapes ranging from mysteriously aggressive Not Going–electronica made with vintage digital keyboards and oral history archives–to Noisemaker, a low-bit shoegaze anthem with janky breakbeats and organ drums.
Méthé’s dynamic song cycle is jumpstarted by the record’s grungy yet uplifting title track and quickly mulls over an array of emotions like ferocious Fiction Feel, Come Over Here’s seductiveness, and highly angsty Centre-Ville. The meditative song cycle winds down with an ambient instrumental called Turning before leading us to their closer, Tina; an ultra-personal ballad about anosognosia.
First off care to introduce yourself to our readers?
Béatrix: Hey! We’re Béatrix Méthé and Quinn Bachand 🙂 I grew up in rural Québec (Ste-Béatrix) and Quinn is from Vancouver Island. We met playing traditional folk music with our families and Quinn started producing my band, Rosier, in 2019. Around that time, we started writing songs together as Diamond Day and just put out our first record on February 29th.
Tell us a bit about your recent release.
Quinn: Since we started collaborating in 2019, this project has evolved into something we’re really excited to share. It’s a 10-song dream pop album we made by ourselves over the past couple of years. We collaborated with a few of our favorite musicians throughout the process, including Jorge Elbrecht, Sebastian Kinsler from Feeble Little Horse, and Elijah Marrett-Hitch (from Victoria, BC). Connect the Dots is a dynamic song cycle about death, rebirth, and mental health and contains an expansive, shoegaze-y ambiance and stressful moments of glitch-pop.
How do you typically go about the songwriting process? Do you have a specific method or creative routine that you follow?
Béatrix: Every song is different. Either Quinn or I will start a song by making a demo and then the race to the end is always a new experience. For instance, I made a 1-minute version of Noisemaker on acoustic guitar and Juno in my room and emailed it to Quinn. He built it out in Pro Tools over a few weeks, added guitars, drums, and stuff, and then we replaced the voice and kept some synths, etc. For Centre-Ville, Quinn wrote and recorded the entire song within a couple of hours. He mumbled random lyrics in English and I phonetically translated them to French–that was that.
Looking ahead, what are your plans for supporting this new release? Are there any upcoming tours, music videos, or additional content that fans can look forward to in connection with this project?
Quinn: We have an East Coast tour coming up March 22-28 supporting the release. We can’t wait to do it all live. We’ll have some merch with us, but if you can’t make it out, you can find it on our website, Spotify, or Instagram… Next up, we have some remixes and collabs that we’re super excited to announce in the next few months!
Looking back on your musical career, is there a particular moment or accomplishment that you consider a turning point or a highlight?
Béatrix: The beginning of the pandemic probably. Our lives were “on track.” Quinn had just graduated from Berklee and his other band was just nominated for a Grammy. My folk-rock band, Rosier, started taking off a little bit and we were touring non-stop. When the pandemic hit, we were surprisingly excited about the idea of doing nothing (or just being in control of our day-to-day). That’s when everything shifted and we decided to do what we wanted in music. This project feels like that. Totally new. We’ve learned so much throughout the process, about new technology, taste, and perspective–we feel responsible for a lot more than we ever have and it feels more rewarding.
Last but not least, it’s time to pay it forward, what upcoming band or artist would you recommend your fans check out?
Quinn: We’re excited to share the stage in March with some cool new bands like Chlöe Doucet, Coatie Pop, Noah Kesey, distraction4ever, Iceblynk, and Sun Entire. All those bands are super cool and worth checking out!