POSTPONED: Disq

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Sean Kelly

Disq

press release: Madison, Wisconsin’s Disq released two songs in 2019 for Saddle Creek’s Document Series, earning early praise from the likes of NPR Music, The FADER, Stereogum, and more. Now the band have officially signed to Saddle Creek, and announce their remarkable debut album Collector. Collector, like the band itself, is defined and tightly-contoured by the ties between its members. Raina Bock (bass/vocals) and Isaac deBroux-Slone (guitar/vocals) have known each other from infancy, growing up and into music together. Now in their early 20s and a five-piece, rounded out by Shannon Connor (guitar/keys/vocals), Logan Severson (guitar/vocals), and Brendan Manley (drums), Disq have assembled a razor-sharp, teetering-on-the-edge-of-chaos melange of sounds, experiences, memories, and influences on their debut LP. Produced by Rob Schnapf (Beck, Elliot Smith, Kurt Vile), Collector is a set of songs largely pulled from each of the five members’ demo piles over the years. They’re organic representations of each moment in time, gathered together to tell a mixtape-story of growing up in 21st century America with your best friends.

Disq have shared "Loneliness," the second single and video from their anticipated new album, Collector, out March 6 via Saddle Creek.

Of the song, Isaac deBroux-Slone says "'Loneliness' is about the feeling of helplessness you get after someone you love has moved far away. At the time, my high-school girlfriend of a few years was moving from Madison to Los Angeles for college. We'd decided to stay together, but with the distance I began to feel a kind of loneliness that I hadn't known before. The lyrics were written over several sad days sitting in my room, and combined with a guitar riff Raina came up with."

Collector ought to be taken literally—it is a place to explore and catalogue the Madison, Wisconsin band’s relationships to themselves, their pasts, and the world beyond the American Midwest as they careen from their teens into their 20s. This turbulence is backdropped by gnarled power pop, anxious post-punk, warm psych-folk, and hectic, formless, tongue-in-cheek indie rock. Having literally known eachother since almost the day they were born, Bock and deBroux-Slone started jamming in middle school (Bock vividly recalls being floored by deBroux-Slone covering “Jesus of Suburbia” on the drums), and by high school they were playing in bands together. Through gigging around Madison, they met and befriended Connor, Severson and Manley—three equally dedicated and adventurous musicians committed to coaxing genre boundaries.

The fact of Disq’s origin in a mid-size Midwestern city is an inextricable thread in their story and sound. The insular nature and isolated geography of Wisconsin allowed for what Bock and deBroux-Slone describe as an incubator effect: unhindered by competition and explicitly capitalist practices that more populous music communities tend to foster and necessitate, Madison has allowed the group a supportive, pretenseless groundwork. “I love feeling like an underdog,” says Bock. “I’m super proud to have grown up in flyover country.”

Throughout Collector, the group displays a shrewd understanding of pop and rock structures and their corollaries, as well as a keen desire to dialogue with and upset them. These tendencies aren’t intentional; they just are. For Disq, these are unconscious pursuits, which makes Collector all the more remarkable: it is the sound of a group of young musicians learning who they are, excavating where they’re from, and wondering where to go next. As a decade and chapters in their lives end, Disq are just beginning.

Early praise for Disq:

“Hard-charging power-pop with lyrics about disaffection [and] loneliness.” - NPR

“Midwesterners making crunchy power-pop filled with longing and heart.” - The FADER

“Disq sound like they took meticulous notes on Todd Rundgren instead of the modern-day bands influenced by him.” - Stereogum

“Traces of feverish psych-rock, lustrous jangle pop, noisy post-punk, and bouncy twee pop…[and] a consistently vociferous energy thanks to their propulsive guitar triple threat.” - Paste

“Genuine classics of new-school indie rock...startling accomplished songs.” - The Guardian