Mr. Smalls Presents
Deafheaven / DIIV
With Special Guests

Doors: 7:00 pm / Show: 8:00 pm

Tickets: $21 - $23
Tickets on sale this Friday, 8/3 @ 10 AM
This event is all ages

Deafheaven is a California-based act that has garnered acclaim for their signature hybrid sound of black metal, shoegaze, and post-rock. On October 2 the band will release their next album New Bermuda on ANTI-.

George Clarke (vocals), Kerry McCoy (guitar), Dan Tracy (drums), Stephen Lee Clark (bass), and Shiv Mehra (guitar) recorded New Bermuda live to tape at 25th Street Recording in Oakland, CA and Atomic Garden Recording in East Palo Alto, CA in April 2015. It was produced, engineered, mixed, and mastered by Jack Shirley who has worked with the band on their previous releases. Clarke says that he came up with the idea of “New Bermuda” to describe a new destination in life, a nebulous point of arrival, and an unknown future where things get swallowed up and dragged into darkness. The album artwork for New Bermuda is an oil painting, dense in brush strokes of darker tones and deep blues, by Allison Schulnik. The layout was designed by art director Nick Steinhardt.

Formed in 2010 in San Francisco, California, the band has released two studio albums on Deathwish; Roads to Judah in 2011 and their lauded Sunbather in 2013. Sunbather received accolades from NPR on their Favorite Albums of 2013 list, a coveted Best New Music at Pitchfork, the Best Metal Album of 2013 per Rolling Stone, a 9/10 star review from Decibel Magazine, and it was the highest rated album of 2013 according to Metacritic. Deafheaven have spent the last two years touring extensively nationally and around the world with shows in Australia, Japan, Asia, Europe, Russia, the UK, and Canada with festival appearances at Pitchfork, Bonnaroo, Primavera, Roskilde, Fun Fun Fun, FYF Fest, SXSW, Basilica Sound Scape 14, Corona Capital, ATP Iceland, amongst others. Deafheaven will perform August 8 at Heavy Montreal in Canada. Details on a forthcoming North American tour are soon to be announced.
DIIV is the nom-de-plume of Z. Cole Smith, musical provocateur and front-man of an atmospheric and autumnally-charged new Brooklyn four-piece.

Recently inked to the uber-reliable Captured Tracks imprint, DIIV created instant vibrations in the blog-world with their impressionistic debut Sometime; finding it’s way onto the esteemed pages of Pitchfork and Altered Zones a mere matter of weeks after the group’s formation.

Enlisting the aid of NYC indie-scene-luminary, Devin Ruben Perez, former Smith Westerns drummer Colby Hewitt, and Mr. Smith’s childhood friend Andrew Bailey, DIIV craft a sound that is at once familial and frost-bitten. Indebted to classic kraut, dreamy Creation-records psychedelia, and the primitive-crunch of late-80’s Seattle, the band walk a divisive yet perfectly fused patch of classic-underground influence.

One part THC and two parts MDMA; the first offering from DIIV chemically fuses the reminiscent with the half-remembered building a musical world out of old-air and new breeze. These are songs that remind us of love in all it’s earthly perfections and perversions.

A lot of DIIV’s magnetism was birthed in the process Mr. Smith went through to discover these initial compositions. After returning from a US tour with Beach Fossils, Cole made a bold creative choice, settling into the window-facing corner of a painter’s studio in Bushwick, sans running water, holing up to craft his music.

In this AC-less wooden room, throughout the thick of the summer, Cole surrounded himself with cassettes and LP’s, the likes of Lucinda Williams, Arthur Russell, Faust, Nirvana, and Jandek; writings of N. Scott Momaday, James Welsh, Hart Crane, Marianne Moore, and James Baldwin; and dreams of aliens, affection, spirits, and the distant natural world (as he imagined it from his window facing the Morgan L train).

The resulting music is as cavernous as it is enveloping, asking you to get lost in it’s tangles in an era that demands your attention be focused into 140 characters.