Indie punk band Die! Die! Die! burst forth from Dunedin, New Zealand in 2005 with a hard-edged debut album that favoured abrasive noise over melody or song longevity. Their second release, 2007’s Promises, Promises doubled that album's duration to 40 minutes, and saw the band exploring a more restrained style of songwriting without losing their characteristic urgency and impact.

Three years later, their third full-length is due. To whet our appetites, they’ve released a new video [for ‘We Built Our Own Oppressors’, see below] and are touring Australia throughout April. The Vine’s Andrew McMillen video called Die! Die! Die! singer/guitarist Andrew Wilson in Auckland, to discuss outsider perceptions of New Zealand, supporting Marilyn Manson, history’s great Kiwi bands, and turning down European tours with Brian Jonestown Massacre.

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Die! Die! Die! - 'We Built Our Own Opressors'

Hey Andrew.

I’ve never done an interview where you can see each other! [laughs]

It’s a first for both of us, then. I’m going to start with a broad question. Why do you think people like your band?

I don’t know if they do like our band. [laughs] I just don’t know. I don’t know why they like our band. We’ve got a good drummer. I think we’re pretty genuine with what we do, I guess.

The band is rhythmically strong, obviously, but there is a great sense of melody that underpins your work, especially on Promises, Promises.

And the new ones even more melodicy.

Melodicy?

Melodicy, yeah. [laughs]

Do you identify with the term “avant garde punk,” which the press release uses to describe your sound?

Oh, our agent Joe [Segreto, of IMC] has got a way with words. Yeah, avant garde punk - I don’t know. I think of us as a punk band, but being punk is so weird nowadays, do you know what I mean? It’s pretty hard to call yourself a punk band, and then ‘avant garde’ is a bit pretentious. [laughs] I don’t know. We’re kind of a bit of a weird band to pigeonhole. It’s kind of a bummer that we’re so hard to pigeonhole actually. It would be good to have a specific place to put us.

I’ve seen the band twice before – ‘Wolfgang’ at Alhambra in April 2008, and at The Zoo in November 2008. I like that despite the intense live shows, you’ve got the songwriting and performance skills to back it up.

Yeah, we try. I think we did a lot of touring before Promises, Promises came out, and we started to wonder why people were there to see us. I think we really made an active effort to kind of write songs. I think we also come from a background in Dunedin, which is known for its good songwriting, I think.

Did you ever make the conscious decision to say, “Okay, during this show, I’m going to spend half of it in the crowd, pushing them around”?

Nah. We don’t really do that. Where that come from; in New Zealand, our crowds are always really big. There are quite a lot of people at our shows in New Zealand, and it was always more about the interaction and the crowd-surfing, having a bit of a party. I think we went to Australia and the shows weren’t as busy but now they’re pretty good. It was always trying to get that same kind of crowd interaction.

The atmosphere.

Yeah, that party vibe. In New Zealand, I don’t jump into the crowd and push people around. It’s an ‘everyone together’ kind of thing.

Is it fair to say you’re more popular overseas than at home?

I don’t know. I think we’re pretty much the same everywhere. We’re not like a big band, but we can get good crowds everywhere we go, like we get a couple hundred people everywhere we go, I guess. It’s just because New Zealand is such a small place. I don’t know. Sometimes you do shows where there’s just like 15 people there. Numbers aren’t really my forte. I kind of just judge things by whether people are dancing and having a good time.

Do you think it was once the case of “Oh, let’s go see that New Zealand band? That’ll be exotic”?

Nah, never, because we did do DIY shows, was what we kind of started touring in Europe and America, and the DIY scenes everywhere have bands from Israel, lots of different places touring. New Zealand isn’t really that exotic, if you think about it. People just think we’re part of Australia. [laughs] In Germany you get people who come just to check you out because you’re from New Zealand because there’s a kind of connection to Flying Nun.

Which New Zealand bands did you admire? Who influenced you when you started out as a musician?

The Dead C were a huge influence on us, just from their ‘free noise’ kind of stuff. Bailter Space, Snapper, The Clean, just that kind of intensity and volume, the loudness. The Gordons, The Cakekitchen, Peter Jefferies; I can keep going. I’d say those are the biggest influences.

Are Bailter Space still going?

Well, actually, Mikey is buying a drum kit off the drummer at the moment. Yeah, they are. They’re coming back hopefully at the end of the year.

They’re awesome. I like them a lot.

They are awesome. We played - it was actually our band before Die! Die! Die! - we played with  [guitarist] Alister Parker and that was – oh, talking about New Zealand bands, we were really influenced by The Skeptics. That was a really defining moment when we played with Alister Parker and just hearing those kind of guitar sounds. It was like, “whoa man, that’s fucked up.” [laughs] Not pointlessly fucked up but there was like good tunes, and there’s fucked up sound, and really loud, and really moved you. It was awesome.

Is there a particular song off your last two albums that you are most proud of?

Compared to our new one, both albums suffer from the fact they’re really rushed. We did the first album in two days and then Promises, Promises we did in 10 days in a barn. Each album’s got about four or five songs I’m quite proud of, and the other ones are kind of like, “Eh”. You move on, but they sounded really good at the time.

My favourite song is ‘Sideways Here We Come’.


Die! Die! Die! - 'Sideways Here We Come'

Yeah, that was definitely a defining moment when we wrote that song. It was the last song we wrote on Promises, Promises and it was just so different. We were just playing with this idea. It’s bloody hard to play live, that one, though.

I’ve seen you twice and you haven’t played it either time.

Oh really? It’s kind of weird, ‘cause like, when it’s good live, it’s really good, but it’s quite a bit quieter than the other songs and also we notice that when we play it the crowd wouldn’t really react to it the same way. I don’t know. We probably should play it more.

I think so. I’ve listened to the song literally hundreds of times and I think this morning, while preparing for this, I finally ascertained what you’re saying in the chorus for maybe the first time.

Oh no! Don’t talk about this!

Let me try - is it “some things are best left blind”?

“Best done blind.”

“Some things are best done blind/ Not enough to make it mine.”

Yeah. It was a long time ago now, it makes me feel a bit embarrassed.

How much attention do you pay to the music media?

None. We’ve been completely ignored in New Zealand since we started, but we’re starting to get covered now, which is really weird after five years.

But, oh, that’s a bit of a lie; of course I pay attention to it. You always want to know what people are saying about you, unfortunately, because I always get really depressed about it. I always expect the worse whenever I’m about to read something. It’s that old saying: you’ll read 100 good reviews, and then the one bad review hits you more than the 100 good reviews, you know? I try to make an active effort not to look at anything, especially in New Zealand because the media here is so… [blows a raspberry] They jump on every trend.

Outside of New Zealand you’re quite well regarded by the likes of Spin and Pitchfork, and NME.

Yeah, I guess. NME’s been a really nice source. I’d hate to see if they started saying mean things. I shouldn’t really let it affect me but it does. Everything affects you, even people on sodding internet forums. It shouldn’t, but it does. It’s just the type of person I am.

Are you happy with this point in the band’s career?

Yeah. I think our new album’s really good. I really like it and it’s been quite good that within the last six months we’ve kind of haven’t really been playing that many shows. We finished our album in November and it’s not out yet. We’ve pretty much got a whole good chunk of almost another album done, so when we get this album out, we probably can have an album afterwards really quickly so it won’t be so staggered like the last two albums. That will be really cool. I’m excited about that. And we’re really good friends, our band, and we all kind of hang out, too

Obviously you spend a lot of time on the road, it would be a bit of a pain in the arse if you weren’t good friends.

Yeah. It’s pretty good. We’re sorting everything out. You kind of get trapped in a bit of a ‘tour mode’, and it takes a while to get back to real life and be real people. Does that make any sense?

Do you set goals with the band or do you kind of go with the flow?

Kind of go with the flow. I mean our main goal was when we started to be able to make a living off the band and be able to tour, and we’ve done that. We kind of need a new goal. If anyone has any goals, send them in! [laughs]

I want to ask you about the Wolfmother connection. You toured the US with them.

Yeah, we toured with them twice in the US. I got an email from Andrew Stockdale [Stockdale, Wolfmother singer and guitarist] today. He’s been jamming with Slash.

Jealous?

Oh no, I’m not jealous. I wouldn’t want to jam with Slash...but Andrew’s an awesome dude.

How important are those kind of big support slots for your career?

Not very important, I don’t think so. We’re a pretty different band to Wolfmother. It was awesome to have the opportunity to play but I think we only met like a handful of freaks who really liked our band. That was it. Iit’s kind of weird. Support things, you think they’re a big waste of time and then three years down the track you get an email from someone saying, “I saw you play such and such venue sometime and it was really awesome and it made me want to form a band.”  That was cool.

But we toured with Wolfmother, particularly in the southern parts of America, we got a lot of homophobic hate mail and everyone thought we were gay. It was really weird. They were like “Your guitars are all out of tune!” It was pretty awesome though.

It’s kind of weird because with Wolfmother we thought that it was always Chris [Ross, Wolfmother’s original bassist/keyboardist] and Myles, [Heskett, the original drummer] who the first two who were really into our band. But since they left the band we’ve still kind of stayed in touch. It’s pretty admirable because our first trip to Australia we played with Wolfmother – this is like six years ago – it was at really small venues and I thought they were a pretty awesome rock band. But I had no idea they were going to turn into this behemoth. They’re one of the biggest rock bands in the world. It’s crazy.

I can’t imagine you standing on stage at those kind of arena shows, given your tendency to get up close and personal. Did you still engage in those tactics?

Yeah, definitely. We still played exactly the same. That was the thing. It’s just weird because it really depends on the places, when you play with bands like that. We played with Marilyn Manson and that was even worse.

Whoa. What?

[laughs] We got covered in spit and bottles thrown at us. It was really fucked up.

Was that a once off?

Yeah it was, in New Zealand. It was like – hate. I don’t want to sound like it was a bad thing, because it was amazing. But it was like, you can’t expect everyone to get into you. When you play those headline shows, to be honest, no-one is really there to see the small bands anyway. We just got offered a big tour with the Brian Jonestown Massacre around Europe. We kinda turned it down because we were like – well, we’ve kind of done enough supports now that we don’t really need to do anymore.

Fair enough. Are you going to be road dogs forever? You seem to tour harder than 99% of bands.

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.

That’s when they were playing as ‘White Feather’.

That was really weird. Brisbane is a weird place. Lachie, our bass player, is from Brisbane. You never know if people are going to come see us there. I have no idea. You feel like a bit of a douche bag when you come all this way and play to about 10 people. You go, “Ah, should have just stayed home.” Well not like that, you just want to play more than 10 people if you’ve gone all that way.

Was this how you’d always intended the band’s career to happen – to get out of New Zealand as soon as possible and tour the world?

We don’t really think about it. We formed our band and we didn’t even really think we’d even go to Australia or anywhere else. We just thought that we would just play in New Zealand. And then it just kind of steamrolled. We met really good people in Australia who really liked our band.

It’s kind of weird. It’s been surreal because we’re pretty small town boys, really. We’re from Dunedin, which is a small city and even Auckland, still seems like a big city. It doesn’t anymore, but it did when the band started. We’d go to Sydney and we’d be walking around with a disposable camera and taking photos of buildings like a complete dick. We don’t really have management or anything so we’re not the most career-oriented rock band. It would be great if we were. But we’re not.

Would you recommend your path to other bands?

Nah, I don’t think so. Doing it yourself is a lot more fulfilling but it does take a lot more work. We’ve had managers and it’s always ended badly. If we meet the right person we’ll probably get them to take over and do that side of things, but until the right person comes along, there’s no point.

Final question – how do you feel about the state of music in 2010?

It’s quite funny; the whole musical spectrum of the world has kind of changed. It’s been really great. You kind of feel like there’s a lot more like-minded people, because about five years ago there was… nothing. That’s why you end up playing with bands like Marilyn Manson.

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Die! Die! Die!'s third album is due later in 2010.

DIE! DIE! DIE! - AUSTRALIAN TOUR - APRIL 2010

Thursday 15th April – Annandale, Sydney
Friday 16th April – Pelly Bar, Frankston
Saturday 17th April - Corner, Melbourne
Sunday 18th April - The National, Geelong
Wednesday 21st April – Amplifier, Perth
Thursday 22nd April – Ed Castle, Adelaide
Friday 23rd April – Coolangatta Hotel, Gold Coast
Saturday 24th April – X & Y Bar, Brisbane

Tickets on sale now via Moshtix and Oztix, depending on your location.

See: myspace.com/diediedienz for details.