Music, Style & Culture

Class Of 2012: DZ Deathrays

If you like your rock thrashy and bassy, DZ Deathrays could be the band for you.

If you like your rock thrashy and bassy, DZ Deathrays could be the band for you. Hailing from Brisbane, Australia (that's ok, honest) and formed at a party, this duo are not famed for biting their tongues. DIY catches up with Shane and Simon to talk tapes, touring and The Future. Words: Harriet Jennings; Photos: Sam Bond.

Your EP 'Ruined My Life' was recently released in the UK and came through on a number of different formats via a few different labels, why was that?
Simon: The first one we put out through a couple of mates and it was their first release. And the second one we did through another friend called Johann [Ponniah].
Shane: Over here it's come out on cassette through Kissability, CD through Big Scary Monsters and then there's a vinyl that has two different tracks on Too Pure. So it's been pretty awesome to get everyone to work together.

What made you decide to release on tape?
Shane: [BBC Radio 1's] Jen Long put together Kissability and she just had this idea of bringing back the cassette. Simon: When we heard the offer, we were like "sounds awesome."
Shane: I really like the idea of doing limited edition things and we've never really done that before so it was really cool to be able to do something completely different. I still have a tape deck at home. I'm pretty sure most people have a tape deck somewhere. It's just something cool to collect.

That release sparked a few comparisons to the likes of DFA 1979. What do you make of those remarks?
Simon: Well, we did listen to a lot of DFA when we were making that album...
Shane: We'd rather be compared to a great band than a terrible band. It doesn't faze us at all. The whole basis of the band was influenced by DFA in the beginning, and now that we're doing a lot more than we ever expected to, we want to make our own sound of it. But then it's two people with a heavy bass line so it's always going to be kind of similar to that, which is great because there's not really many other bands that have that.

Speaking of making your own sound, have you been working on new material?
Shane: Yeah, with shows at the moment, we're only playing two songs off the first EP and three off the second EP but we've got a bunch of new songs that we've written for our album that we've been playing for about seven or eight months now. We've got a whole load more that we haven't started playing yet because they're not quite ready.

So what's the plan for the album then?
Shane: We're putting our album out in Australia through IOU, which is Johann's label. We want to get everything released in the UK at the same time. It's good that we're over here touring now because we can maybe sort something
out and release next year around March.

Obviously the EP came out first in Australia as well. What's your position like outside of the UK?
Shane: It's kind of weird. We've toured solidly in Australia for about two years and the first tour we did in Australia was amazing. Our first big tour was in February '09 and we got to tour with Crystal Castles so it was a huge thing for us. From that we really started touring own shows and that was a high point. We've had to climb our way up. I think the last headline tour we did was definitely the best. We've done heaps and heaps of support tours. We just decided that we wanted to go overseas so we've been to America twice and we came over here twice so we've just really been focussing on touring. Seeing that things were really picking up in the UK, we decided to focus on that area and see what happens.

What's the plan for next year then?
Shane: Album. Album'll come out and then we'll do a tour in Australia and a tour over here. We're thinking about relocating to somewhere in the UK or Europe for about six, seven months and then from there we need to get on the festival circuit and see what happens but this is what we really, really want to do.



Taken from the Winter 2011 issue of DIY, available now. For more details click here.