Is the Is Are Tracklist
The sophomore album from Brooklyn dream pop outfit DIIV, Is the Is Are was described by lead singer Zachary Cole Smith as:
a diverse record, it is a happy record, a sad record, a happysad, sadhappy, mad, glad, quiet, mad, dark, glad, poppy, fast, slow, heavy, fast, peaceful, angry, chaotic, beautiful, lost/found, ugly, dry, wet, fuck, fast, dead, heartbroken, in love, loud, quiet, loud, loudquiet, quietloud, happy, mad, quiet, fuck, and loud record.
please like it. please love it. do you love me? DIIV is the real me. fuck, xo cole
Is the Is Are was preceded by a number of teaser tracks, including “Dopamine”, “Bent (Roi’s Song)”, “Under the Sun”, and “Mire (Grant’s Song)”.
The album was well received commercially and critically. Praise came from The Guardian, Spin, and more. NME ranked it in the Top 10 among the “Albums of the Year.” Pitchfork’s audience voted Is the Is Are one of the “Top 50 Albums of 2016” as the outlet dubbed it, “gorgeous.”
“Is the Is Are” Q&A
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Where does the album title come from?
A lot of people have asked about the reasoning behind having such a nonsensical title. So I guess I should try and explain it. Basically, I wanted something slightly disorienting, that felt homemade and imperfect, easy to criticize, something that made the reader feel like they weren’t grasping my intent, like I was being misunderstood, because I’ve felt so misunderstood throughout the entirety of DIIV’s existence. I wanted a title that wasn’t taken from a lyric on the album, or from the title of the album’s lead single, like they usually are. I didn’t want to name our second album 2. I always feel like, if there’s an opportunity to be creative, there’s no reason not to use it. I wanted the title to come straight from the album art. I was really inspired by Concrete Poetry from the 60′s, poetry that took a visual form and was as much visual art as it was poetry. I loved Tom Philips “A Humument”. I wanted the title to come from a poem. Another random inspiration was from the internet – I got a lot of laughs from these two specific internet memes. One was ‘Has anyone really been far as decided to use even go want to do look more like?‘, and another was ‘I accidentally 93MB of rar files’. I felt like language had a specific type of power when it was misused. I wanted something that felt profound, but upon closer inspection was meaningless.
– Zachary Cole Smith, TumblrI reached out to a poet/artist I found in Paris named Frederick Deming who I thought would totally understand where I was coming from. His comics, called Bizaroids, seemed to totally fit with the direction I wanted to go with this album art and title. I felt like English being his second language would add another dimension to the poetry. Within a week, he sent me over thirty poems, and what he came up with couldn’t have been more perfect.
A bunch of these are included in the album art, on the printed eurosleeves, hand-lettered by Frederick. The poem that I chose to take the album title from was the one I felt like fit the project the best:Hear is their.
Story, we is you .
Is the is are.I got this poem in an email from Frederick, and probably less than an hour after I got that email, I had already announced the album title. For me, this line just jumped off the page. I didn’t really have to think about it. I knew what I wanted, and this was it.
– Zachary Cole Smith, Hero Magazine
