Shot captured
DIIV Takeover: Jai Odell shoots Zachary Cole Smith and Andrew Bailey, see the shoot
To mark the release of DIIV’s second album, Is the Is Are, we’ve invited Zachary Cole Smith to take over HERO. Over the coming days, watch out for exclusive content and insights into the Brooklyn based musician’s influences, experiences and obsessions…
For HERO 13, we caught Zachary Cole Smith and Andrew Bailey on a day off from working on their much-hyped second album, for a shoot with photographer Jai Odell. Featured here in full, the photos capture the two musicians and creatives at a fluid point in the process, while ideas were still floating and the record was far from fully formed.
“With the first record I basically recorded it entirely on my own, I had what was almost a finished record before I went into the studio,” Smith tells us in the issue. “For this record I’ve tried to stop myself ironing out every detail because I’ve booked more time in the studio. The first record I did in six days because of our limited budget, I think I had around $3,000 to make that record so I made do with what I had. But now I have something like sixteen or eighteen days for this record, it’s almost three times as much time so I’m hoping to leave a little bit of stuff up to chance and see what happens in the studio.”
I have an idea for a song that I kind of don’t even want to start until I get in the studio because I’ve always read about bands doing it like that, I heard about Nirvana writing On a Plain in the studio and Aerosmith writing Walk This Way the same way and I never understood how people could do that because my experience in the studio was so rushed, so tight, we didn’t have one second to sit down like that. Every millisecond of Oshin was conceived before we went in the studio, if we hadn’t done that we would have been fucked. There’s something cool and romantic about writing songs in the studio and I feel like in a way you’re forced to raise the bar, it all becomes more exciting.”