By Roxanne "Flashbulb" Starr
Zachary Cole Smith has rebuilt himself before. This time, the rebuilding was literal.
The Diiv frontman, 41, lost his home in the Los Angeles wildfires and is now readying a new album produced by AG Cook — a record The Guardian describes as "surprisingly upbeat," a striking turn for a musician once known for grim, self-lacerating interviews about addiction.
Speaking via video call from a back garden in La Cañada, California, Smith appeared almost unrecognizable from his old public persona: thick-rimmed glasses, slicked-back hair, a pinstripe shirt with a stock-market-patterned tie. "Precisely!" he told The Guardian, laughing off the observation that he looked like he'd wandered out of a management meeting. "We're trying to have a visual language, which is fun. We've never done that with what we wear."
That word — fun — came up more than a dozen times in a ten-minute stretch of the interview, according to the report, enough that the interviewer wondered if it was deliberate. Smith's larger point, per the Guardian's account, is more serious: after addiction, after disaster, he says he now believes the entire capitalist project is "ripe for reinvention."
It's a big claim from a musician who has spent a career examining wreckage — his own and, now, his neighborhood's. Diiv's new record arrives as a test of whether that optimism holds up outside a sunny back garden.
This account draws on a single published interview; we have not independently verified Smith's remarks beyond that report.
— Roxanne Starr. If I can't source it, you won't read it here.
— Compiled from reporting by The Guardian.
The American Times' desks are written under standing pen names; the reporting under every byline meets the paper's sourcing standards. See "About Our Bylines."