Montréal-based duo Diamond Day features two highly acclaimed musicians and recording artists in their own right:
- Vermont-born Béatrix Méthé was raised with the traditional music of rural Québec. Her family moved to Canada when she was baby, and she grew up acquiring Lanaudiere’s regional repertoire from her father, the founder of legendary folk-trad group Le Rêve du Diable. Her mother, a singer-songwriter and fine arts graduate versed in early digital media, inspired Méthé’s own aesthetic. After spending some time venturing deeper into visual art, Béthé moved to Montréal to study filmmaking, but wound up discovering indie and psychedelic folk music along the way. She cut her studies short in 2015 to pursue music full-time, fronting acclaimed outfit Rosier, whose unique fusion of Québécois folk and indie rock garnered multiple nominations and awards — and lead them to tour across 15 countries with stops at SXSW, NPR’s Mountain Stage and the BBC.
- Western Canada-born Quinn Bachand grew up in a home where art was omnipresent and the family’s 40-year-old record collection was on an omnipresent loop. As the son of a luthier, Bachand began playing guitars handmade by his father and was touring internationally by the time he turned 12. After graduating from Berklee College of Music back in 2019 on a presidential scholarship, the Western Canadian-born multi-instrumentalist spent time in the Grammy-nominated band Kittel & Co. His involvement in the US folk scene prompted collaborations with a number of like-minded artists, including Chris Thile. In 2019, Bachand began collaborating with Méthé and Rosier, quickly establishing himself as an influential, genre-bending producer.
That initial successful collaboration with Rosier lead to the duo’s forthcoming full-length debut as Diamond Day, Connect the Dots. Released earlier this year, the album saw the duo establishing a sound that weaved elements of folk, indie rock, electronica, shoegaze and dream pop into a unique take on alt-pop.
In the lead-up to the album’s release, I’ve written about two of the album’s singles:
- “Noisemaker,” a song built around tape-saturated organ echo, fluttering synths, blown out beats, a sinuous bass line and lush, painterly sheogazer-like guitar textures paired with Méthé’s gorgeous vocals. The result — to my ears at least — reminded me of a mix of Beach House and Souvlaki-era Slowdive with a subtle amount of glitchiness.
- “Fiction Feel,” a breezy, summertime dream of a song built around a glitch pop soundscape featuring vintage tape recordings, glistening synths and a shuffling organ drum machine before quickly morphing into a lush New Wave/post-punk anthem that brings Cocteau Twins and Violens to mind.
Connect The Dots’ latest single, album closer “Tina,” is a slow-burning and brooding, Beach House and Pavo Pavo-like ballad featuring strummed acoustic guitar, twinkling keys, skittering tape saturated beats serving as a dreamily uneasy bed for Méthé’s gorgeous and expressive delivery. Arguably one of the most personal songs on the entire album, “Tina” tells a story about schizophrenia and anosognosia, a neurological condition in which the patient is unaware of their neurological deficit or psychiatric condition. it’s often associated with mental illness, dementia and structural brain lesion, as seen in right hemisphere stroke patients. As the band’s Quinn Bachard explains, “The song is super personal. It’s about my family, schizophrenia and denial.”
Directed by Robert Desroches, the accompanying video for “Tina” features the band’s Béatrix Méthé in a candy colored room playing keyboard with a DIY set up made of various bric-a-brac. As the song progresses, the videos’ protagonist goes through a deeply hallucinogenic experience.
“Robert had a strong vision for this one,” Méthé says of the video. “He saw something that was dark and luminous at the same time. As if one fueled the other. He pictured a colorful implosion cutting through the softness of the song, in this spooky retro-futuristic setting à la Severance.”