Vanessa Heins
DILLY DALLY and FIDLAR with NOBRO at Phoenix Concert Theatre (410 Sherbourne), Wednesday (September 12), doors 7 pm, all ages. $27.50. ticketfly.com, rotate.com, soundscapesmusic.com.
Dilly Dally’s new album, Heaven (out September 14 on Dine Alone), sounds darker on first listen than their debut, but it’s also a marker of the band’s improved mental health.
The Toronto four-piece put everything they had into 2015’s Sore, and it almost destroyed them.
“It felt like, ‘Oh fuck, this is our one chance at making it and we can’t fuck it up,’” reflects singer/guitarist Katie Monks, on the phone from the office of Dilly Dally’s new record label, Dine Alone, her trademark rasp belying a newfound cheeriness. “It felt ride or die, black and white, you’re in or you’re out.”
In a way, that debut was too successful. Turns out the passionate existential growl of that record reflected their all-or-nothing mindset at the time.
It didn’t help that they were self-managing, handling their own social media, and that the album was blowing up and pushing them on longer and bigger tours.
“And by the time we were done the first campaign, our mental health and our relationships with each other were just totally exasperated. So it was bittersweet because it was successful, but while we were so focused on that one thing, everything else just fell apart.”
Without much communication with the other members of her band – lead guitarist Liz Ball, bassist Jimmy Tony and drummer Benjamin Reinhartz – Monks deleted Facebook and started writing songs alone in her bedroom.
But they didn’t become Dilly Dally songs until the rest of the band got involved, eventually re-convening with Monks in that room and collaborating. It was a while before they were ready to go into the studio, and when they did it was in Los Angeles with producer Rob Schnapf, who Monks credits with getting the fullest, most perfect sound out of each individual instrument.
This time around they were thinking beyond next week’s show and toward capturing a full artistic statement on record.
“The songs [on Sore] were written to play a sold-out show at the Silver Dollar. That was what it was made for,” Katie laughs. “Then we started doing these big tours, and we realized this time around we need to travel with sound engineers and have someone who gets our particular sound, which needs some love behind the board. I’m singing these dreamy, soft raspy vocals over all these dirty guitars, and you need someone who knows how to mix that.”
Heaven is simultaneously way heavier and more optimistic than the debut. There are doom metal references, while the lyrics tackle friendship breakdowns, the struggle of sobriety on the road and, in Bad Biology, a theoretical queer love story free of gender roles that ends in a fantasy of leaving your body.
Despite the dark tones, it’s all laced with direct and earnest mantras of affirmations like “believe in yourself” and “what’s inside you is sacred.”
For a band known for harnessing righteous anger, it’s a jarring lyrical shift. And it was deliberate.
“I usually have this warrior mentality. But I think I was so tired of fighting. And I was so tired of anger,” says Monks. “You turn on your phone and there’s so much rage – often necessary rage because it’s in reaction to a pretty hateful right-wing regime – but I felt like there was enough anger in the world. Why add one more angry voice?
“And also, being able to return to my lovely bubble in west-side Toronto, where I’m able to walk around and be an artist and be feminist, be queer, be in a punk band, feel accepted and loved or appreciated – you know, that’s a privilege. So instead I sought to provide people with hope.
“But I know from any therapy session I’ve had, if you want to help somebody get through depression or a dark time, you need to meet them where they’re at. And you need to acknowledge that their feelings are real and legit. And that’s where the darkness comes on the record, then laced with these painfully positive messages.”
So were these affirmations learned from therapy? No, she says. They came from DJing femme-influenced dance parties.
“Actually, where I learned a lot of this was from pop songs written for little girls with low self-esteem,” she says with a laugh.
She cites the Spice Girls, Destiny’s Child, Britney Spears and TLC, then breaks into the chorus of S Club 7’s Bring It All Back: “Don’t stop, never give up, hold your head high and reach the top, let the world know what you have got, bring it all back to you.”
I was not expecting that.
Monks says so much of her mid-20s were about embracing her masculine side that now she’s embracing her femininity, especially in the context of Dilly Dally.
“It’s like, fuck it, I can do this, too.”
As for Sober Motel, the first song they wrote as a band again for this record, it’s about Tony’s struggle with alcohol addiction.
“It was kind of this silent agreement that we’re one entity, and to acknowledge it and put it into our art and turn it into something positive. It was a special moment when we put it all together and went, ‘Oh shit, Dilly Dally’s back!’”
She stops, takes a beat, and then laughs. “I’ve kind of got a ball in my throat,” she says. “This has been a very emo time.”