Montréal’s Diamond Day make music that is inspired by their love of shoegaze. Led by Rosier’s Béatrix Méthé and multi-instrumentalist, Quinn Bachand, the project began when Quinn moved to Boston as a teenager. The pair discovered an undeniable synergy after meeting at a music festival. Every weekend, Quinn would hop on a Montréal-bound greyhound to write, record and develop songs in Béatrix’s plateau apartment. Their debut record, Connect the Dots, is a described as “hypnotic and shoegazey alt-pop fever dream.” Méthé and Bachand enlisted  producers Jorge Elbrecht and feeble little horse’s Sebastian Kinsler–to synthesize their expansive aesthetic over 10 tracks. Méthé’s magnetic vocals, catchy hooks and stream-of-consciousness lyrics became the band’s razor-sharp focus, cutting through Bachand’s billowing noise-pop soundscapes and creating retro-futuristic euphoria. Ahead of the release, Diamond Day has released the title track to Connect the Dots, which drops on February 29th.

Quinn: “Béatrix’s dad is a prolific fiddle tune writer, super well known for his odd-metered waltzes–‘crooked,’ they call it in Québec. He doesn’t really read music, but he writes complicated, yet intuitive music every day up in rural Quebec. You find this type of style throughout North American old-time country music. It’s all intuition. No math. All of Beatrix’s songs are engrained with those genetics, but you can really hear it on Connect the Dots.”

Béatrix: “I initially wrote the song on acoustic guitar in 2019. I was living in an apartment in Montréal till the owner sold it and gave us a month to get out. Quinn was in his last year at school in Boston, so I bought my first car and was on the road between Back Bay and my parents’ in rural Québec that year. I’d stop and visit my grandparents in Vermont on the way. So much driving…I’d listen to lots of Björk on the car’s CD player. Her song themes have lots of motherhood, identity, heaven and hell and life and death; very universal but well-written, linear and poetic.”

Quinn: “The type of songs that could play both on Christian and satanic radio.”

Béatrix: “And very romantically, I remember quietly writing the song on my grandma’s couch while she was cooking. I was spending so much time with her and my mom at the time, and that had a big influence on the songs. My grandma is in her 90’s so it’s a very slow-paced lifestyle down there–I was born in a small town in the Mad River valley and there’s a calmness about the area in general. I tried to give the form/lyrics that cyclical calming effect with subtle developments from verse to verse, something I find in both Björk and the traditional songs I grew up with.”

Quinn: “I was really into lovesliescrushing for a second there, I love that “ambient shoegaze” type of stuff. There is a lot of that on Isn’t Anything, too. Connect the Dots was in that vein initially but we couldn’t finish it. We were so burnt out and under pressure, especially because we had already decided that it would be the album’s title track. Jorge Elbrecht came on board to help us finish and that’s when it really became the song. So inspiring to have someone like that come in and make a bunch of exciting and definitive decisions. Just objectively good decisions. He solved the puzzle and reminded us what’s fun about music. After that, we were able to finish the album. The song still has that shoegazey guitar feel, but he added so much energy with some arpeggiated synth basses and way cooler drums and effects, the kind of stuff I associate with his productions of Tamaryn and Sky Ferreira.”

Béatrix: “We’re so happy with how it ended up. It represents the album and project as a whole; the death of our pasts and ascension into something new as Diamond Day.”

Quinn: “Maybe descension?”

dig deep
find the wire
it’s a drill
climb a ladder to cohere
extreme vacancy

pre-order Connect The Dots by Diamond Day HERE