In the late 2000s and early 2010s, Canada was alit with folk music. Spread throughout the provinces, these acts were oftentimes musical families that recruited the entire household for the job. Beatrix Méthé and Quinn Banchard grew up in family bands in parallel, sharing something crucial in common before they ever met. “There weren’t very many young people doing folk stuff,” says Bachand.
The young people who were doing folk stuff bandeda together in groups like Rosier, the Montréal folk collective Méthé plays in. In 2019, when Bachand started producing for Rosier, inklings of a different creation began to form. The pair were looking to have a creative outlet outside of folk music and when the pandemic hit, they used their time in isolation to work on the dreamy sounds that would eventually become Diamond Day. During the years on lockdown, they pulled as much from their physical surroundings as they did from their shared creative frameworks.
“We lived right beside the mountain. I run everyday, so I’d run to the top of the mountain and back and listen to music and just have ideas, then come back and record. That’s a big influence, the mountain.”
In 2024, Diamond Day made its debut with their first album, Connect the Dots. The dreampop extravaganza climbs its own peak in a meandering, covertly complex way. The 10-track album is a polished, self-contained body of haze, ambitiously and unsurprisingly adroit. Swimming below layers of glimmering production and misty melodies lay wandering rhythmic meters that Méthé attributes to her folk background. Her father, prominent folk fiddler Claude Méthé, passed down a knack for crooked tunes, which Bachand describes as staggered meters that are “totally stream of consciousness.”
“In pretty much every show I fuck up the timing. When I wrote it, it’s instinctive, I knew where the melody had to end and start. Then when you add drums and bass, sometimes it’s hard to add those instruments and add a beat and have it not be awkward. So we’re trying to find the best middle ground where it can still feel like this interesting melody that’s surprising without being completely random and math-y. That’s something that’s fun to experience and it’s not intentional – when I write a song, I’ll just be feeling that in the moment.”
With folk returning more and more prominently to the American mainstream, I asked them if they felt part of the revival, and if they regretted turning away from the genre during this moment of folk-adoration.
“We left folk when that started. Our timing is bad,” Méthé jokes. Bachand does, however, clarify that whatever folk business is going on in America isn’t what they were doing.
“That’s a totally different thing. We grew up with songs that are hundreds of years old that you learned from your neighbor who doesn’t have a phone or computer. Whereas [what’s happening in America] is hipster folk or something.”
The decidedly not-Hipster-folk influences seem inescapable to their sound, but they aren’t a big concern. After trying to emancipate themselves from the genre, they realized that outrunning it completely was impossible, and not the way around it either.
“Realistically, we can’t help but bring it in, it just comes through. We played a song earlier that’s actually a folk song. It’s so part of us that we tend to crave it in some way. That’s a way that we think could be cool, to incorporate folk stuff is to almost hide it in these more electronic-based songs,” says Méthé.
Beyond embracing their past, Diamond Day has enthusiastically welcomed the modern. Connect the Dots is accompanied by a wide collection of music videos and “Derealizers” that lean into a delightfully sci-fi-esque sensibility. Amorphous neon green tendrils crawl around Méthé, chromatic slime eats her hand while Bachand looks on, recording on a security camera. With support from the Canada Council for the Arts, the visualizers that do stay more grounded in reality are cinematic feats. One featuring a group of Quebecois high-schoolers acting their young hearts out is a personal favorite.
Only a year into the project, the collaborative powers of Diamond Day now include Robin Guthrie. The legendary co-founder of Cocteau Twins is featured on the remix of “Fiction Feel,” one of Diamond Day’s most streamed tracks.
Before the crossover happened, Robin Guthrie seemed like a reach for the pair – a name on a wishlist.
“We wanted to do remixes of every song on the album, we had the people that we wanted to do them, and obviously Robin Guthrie is our hero. We literally just emailed him and it was super coincidental that he was traveling and was in Montréal that day. He was like, ‘I just looked up your area code, it says you’re in Montréal, do you wanna get coffee, hang out?’” Méthé recounts. It almost seemed too good to be true. “I thought we were getting scammed.”
It was no Robin Guthrie impersonator. Within 24 hours, they met the man in the flesh and hit it off immediately.
“He was just really into doing it. Extremely cool guy. Extremely DIY, and I think maybe that’s why he was excited about doing it, because we’re also like that,” Bachand says.
The power of DIY has paid off for Diamond Day so far – and they show no signs of slowing down any time soon. After a long string of Canadian and US shows, a new album is on the horizon. For Americans missing our Northern friends already, Bachand would like you to rest assured that a return to the states is in the cards.
“The goal would be to keep making music every day and keep playing in the best country in the world, the United States of America.”
