#RisingArtist : Let's get the Daily Routine on Disq, Shall we?
Photo Credit: Sean Kelly
“Midwesterners making crunchy power-pop filled with longing and heart.”
Tour Dates:
1/14 - London, UK @ The Lexington (Five Day Forecast)
1/15 - London, UK @ The Old Blue Last *
3/16-22 - Austin, TX @ SXSW
4/3 - Iowa City, IA @ Mission Creek Festival
4/4 - Chicago, IL @ Schubas ^
4/6 - Detroit, MI @ PJ's Lager House ^
4/7 - Toronto, ON @ The Drake ^
4/9 - Boston, MA @ Great Scott ^
4/10 - New York, NY @ Rough Trade ^
4/11 - Philadelphia, PA @ Boot & Saddle ^
4/12 - Washington, DC @ Songbyrd ^
4/14 - Nashville, TN @ High Watt
4/15 - Kansas City, MO @ Uptown Theater
4/17 - Denver, CO @ Larimer Lounge
4/18 - Salt Lake City, UT @ Kilby Court
4/20 - San Diego, CA @ Soda Bar ~
4/21 - Los Angeles, CA @ The Echo ~
4/22 - San Francisco, CA @ Cafe du Nord ~
4/24 - Seattle, WA @ Barboza ~
4/25 - Portland, OR @ Doug Fir ~
4/28 - Minneapolis, MN @ 7th St Entry
5/1 - Madison, WI @ High Noon Saloon
* w/ The Districts
^ w/ Pom Pom Squad
~ w/ Girl Friday
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 has officially signed to Saddle Creek, and announce they're 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 (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. Pre-order Collector, out March 6th, HERE. There are 200 Coke Bottle Clear LP’s available exclusively from the Saddle Creek online store.
To celebrate the album announcement, Disq shares Collector’s album opener and lead single entitled “Daily Routine.” The hard-hitting track is a massive introduction to the record, encapsulating fatigued modern nausea, as DeBroux-Slone declares in an apathetic, tuneful groan “This is my daily routine/Spend my hours on a computer screen...I’m in prison but I think this place was built by me.” He’s backed by woozy guitars before the whole band crashes in like a panic attack, with tempo darting up and down throughout the song. "’ Daily Routine' is a song about an intense personal struggle,” Isaac DeBroux-Slone explains. “In dark times, life can feel like a cycle that I’m trapped in, repeating over and over with no means of escape. It’s easy to fall into a void, thinking that everybody else has it all figured out while losing sight of the fact that many others feel the same way.”
Collector ought to be taken literally—it is a place to explore and catalog 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 known each other 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 is just beginning.
