Die! Die! Die! (New Zealand post-punk band)

Die! Die! Die! (sometimes styled Die!Die!Die!) is a three-piece New Zealand noise pop/punk/post-punk band. Formed in late 2003, the band has released seven albums, all backed with extensive international touring. A number of different bass guitarists have played alongside the permanent members, Andrew Wilson (guitar, vocals) and Michael Prain (drums). Lachlan Anderson's second spell with the band began in 2018. While at Logan Park High School in Dunedin, Wilson and Prain were three-time Pepsismokefree Rockquest entrants – in 1999 with The Drummer Smells Nice, then twice with Carriage H. They won the national competition in 2001. With Wilson playing bass guitar, Prain on drums and the guitarist/vocalist Tim "Tiddy" Smith, Carriage H released one EP, Power of Grey Skull, in 2002 and disbanded shortly afterwards. Along with the bass guitarist Ricky French, Wilson (who began playing guitar for the first time) and Prain then formed a short-lived Wellington-based group called Rawer. Henry Oliver (who later became Die! Die! Die!'s second bass guitarist) saw Rawer perform and recalled the sound as "a sea of pedals and effects". In 2003, Wilson and Prain moved again, to Auckland. There they were inspired by the local music scene to form Die! Die! Die! together with Kane Goulter on bass guitar. Writing in 2018, Oliver recalled being in the crowd at a Die! Die! Die! gig in summer 2003–2004. "It was meant to be their last show," and after the apparent disbanding of Die! Die! Die!, Wilson, Prain and Oliver (who had been a member of So To Speak) started a new band – the latter pulling out of a Masters in Cultural Studies course to do so. Initially Wilson and Oliver both played guitar, but the latter ended up as bass guitarist. "We immediately started practising four or five times a week and soon decided to continue the name Die! Die! Die!. I always liked the name, people already knew the band, and they had recently received NZ On Air funding for a single which was still to be released, so, why start at the bottom of the hill again?" – Henry Oliver, 2018 Within weeks of this new incarnation of Die! Die! Die! forming, the band began touring. At first they performed four dates around the North Island, then a national tour followed before they travelled to Australia. "We existed in a constant state of momentum" and within two years had also taken in the UK, Europe, and the USA. Oliver recalled that, "we played shows in every town in the country that would have us and eventually, tiny clubs and dive bars around the world. The band wasn’t lazy, daydreamy or unreliable. From the beginning, we practised at least four days a week when we weren’t on tour. When we were, we did it relentlessly, playing everywhere we could, as many times as we could. Unlike other bands I’d been in, it wasn’t a hobby. It was fun, but it wasn’t for fun. It wasn’t a job because it didn’t pay. It was a vocation." Recorded releases quickly followed the formation of this touring trio, starting with their first EP, Die! Die! Die! in 2005. A debut, self-titled album was recorded the same year, during the band's first trip to the US, at Electrical Audio in Chicago with Steve Albini, whom the band met through fellow Dunedinites HDU, producing. Wilson later recalled that "we did the first album in two days". It was released in New Zealand in January 2006. An international release followed soon after (including North America on SAF Records). In 2006 a second EP, Locust Weeks, followed. It was co-produced by Kevin S. McMahon at Marcata Recording in New Paltz, New York. All four tracks of Locust Weeks were added into the British release of the album Die! Die! Die!, on Pet Piranha Records. Die! Die! Die! returned to the United States for a tour that included the 2006 edition of the Austin, Texas, South By Southwest festival, where they played "the last slot of the night on the closing night of the festival". "The Austin Chronicle warned that you would lose all indie street cred if you missed them play, and influential UK industry mag MusicWeek ended up picking them as one of their ten highlights of SXSW." Soon after South By Southwest, and fuelled at least in part by connections made at that festival, the band toured with Wolfmother and played in the UK, mainland Europe, and Japan. Oliver, writing in 2016, said, "At the time, Die! Die! Die! existed on a kind of low-budget neverending tour. We'd leave New Zealand for as long as possible, play as many shows we could get in a row and then decamp somewhere until we booked another bunch of shows." He left the band during a month-long break from touring in 2006, going on to law school and eventually becoming a journalist. He was replaced in the band by the Australian Lachlan Anderson. On 8 April 2007, Die! Die! Die! played a show at the Echo in Los Angeles. The resulting six-track live recording, Part Time Punks, included two songs from the Die! Die! Die! album and one from Locust Weeks. The closing track, "Blue Skies", (which dates back to Oliver's time with the band) had not been released before, but a studio version did appear as the final track of Promises, Promises later in the year. Over the European summer, a reunited Slint toured Europe with Die! Die! Die! in support. Promises, Promises was the band's second full-length album. Returning to work in New Paltz, New York the album was recorded, and mixed by Kevin S. McMahon at his Marcata Recording in sessions that Wilson later described as "ten days in a barn". Shayne Carter (Straitjacket Fits, Dimmer) was invited to produce the record by Die! Die! Die!, the first time he played that role for another band. New Zealand saw an October 2007 release for the album, followed by releases around the world (February 2008 in the US). The album saw the band move away from the more hardcore tendencies of their first record towards a more bass- and drum-heavy sound – partly due to the influence of the new bass guitarist Lachlan Anderson, but also because a broken hand limited Wilson's guitar-playing. Carter had seen the band at SXSW and said, "Andrew had his broken hand at that point and I said to him, bro you should use that as a weapon, you know? Just make it more minimalist." When he was brought on as producer later, he wanted to remove "bells and whistles" and keep the sound minimalist. In a four-star NME review, Camilla Pia wrote that Promises Promises "is all squeals and yelps, tornado riffs and frantic battered drums – and if that's not enough for you, it's emotional, danceable and catchy to boot". The Guardian, calling Die! Die! Die! "a peculiarly lip-smacking band", also gave four stars. After touring for almost three years worldwide, the band began working on a third album in Dunedin. After writing and rehearsing, mainly at Chicks Hotel in Port Chalmers, they recorded Form over nine days in Auckland with producer Nick Roughan (Skeptics) in August 2009. It was their first album recorded in New Zealand. In April 2010 Wilson said that Form was "finished...in November", although it wasn't released for another half a year. Even while Form was in production and work had begun on its successor, Die! Die! Die! kept touring. What seemed to the band like a reduced schedule for 2009–10 was summarised as: "We haven’t done much touring this year. Last year we only did about three tours or so. We did one two-month European tour and one month in Europe. We did a couple of New Zealand tours and I think we only went to Australia twice last year. I think we only played Brisbane once and that was with Wolfmother." – Andrew Wilson, April 2010 Form was released in July 2010 during a 13-date tour of New Zealand, then shows in Australia, UK, Europe, and USA followed. Wilson called it "dense sounding". It debuted at number 1 on New Zealand's independent charts and number 19 on the National Album charts. The New Zealand Herald gave it a 5/5 rating and called it "certainly their best lot of songs to date". Under The Radar judged it