Artist Profile: Diary

Photo Credit: Luke Ivanovich

When former college friends Chris Croarkin and Kevin Bendis first reconvened in New York to form Diary, there was an immediate sense that they wanted to pursue a guitar-driven pop sound— something they hadn’t fully gotten the opportunity to dive into through their ventures with other bands. Diary was born from that impulse.

But across their first few EPs, a wide-ranging expression of that sound was fleshed out, and as they prepare for the release of their debut album Spiral Bound, it’s clear they’ve reached a sort of zenith of what that vision can entail, trailing between the fuzzed-out ballads and mythologized jangle-pop that has defined the band over its years of presence in the NYC scene.

Coming into college, both Croarkin and Bendis came from relatively similar musical backgrounds. While Croarkin grew up immersed in his parents’ tastes in The Beatles and The Beach Boys, he soon drifted into punk and hardcore material in his adolescence. At the time he and Bendis met, that was Croarkin’s sonic vein— the fast-paced murkiness of those scenes were what captivated him creatively. Bendis, meanwhile, came from a family of painters and artists who shared, to some extent, the tastes of Croarkin’s parents. Through his adolescence, Bendis also primarily explored the punk and emo scenes as he formulated his musical identity.

It wasn’t just those shared affinities that brought them together in college, though. At their school, the artistic crowd was relatively small, and anyone with any creative sensibilities tended to gravitate toward each other. Croarkin and Bendis, by this time, had begun to explore more of the ‘80s and ‘90s rock that expounded upon some of their preferred creative themes with a softer touch— bands like The Stone Roses and The Smiths served as the cornerstones of their jointly developing tastes.

That shared interest is what helped the duo first bond.

“I remember sort of going from like Circa Survive to Sigur Rós and Sujan Stevens and then The Smiths…” said Bendis, “I think we both like had a similar interest in poppy music that has a forlornness to it, but still had that jangled basis that's in all The Smiths things and The Cure and so many early or late 80s groups. That’s what we eventually gravitated towards.”

Yet even when they graduated and moved on to New York City, the duo hadn’t collaborated in a creative capacity. Bendis went to work in a synth-pop group, and Croarkin plugged away in various other bands. But when the duo finally decided to pursue a project together, the natural ambition was to follow the path their tastes had already laid for them. Although it began simply as a series of jams and loosely-held practices, Diary soon arose from these sessions.

At first, the group tended toward the gothier side of things— calling back to The Cure and even the earliest demos of The Smashing Pumpkins— while implementing their own, wide-sprawling twist on the lo-fi ethos of that sound. 

“Echo & The Bunnymen is still a big touchstone for us,” said Bendis, “Early on we were doing this cover of ‘The Cutter,’ which is still a favorite of mine, and that was a fun one to do. [Our sound] was definitely a little bit darker, but still pretty jangly. I got pretty loud at times and I think that was before we were doing very fuzzy stuff, but it had lots of flange and reverb on almost everything, which I still love, but that was way more our general sound across the board.”

Their first EP, 2017’s Love Shadows, mirrors this early sound pretty closely. But as they continued to develop in their collaborative efforts, their sound began to spread its tendrils outwards.

Then, when the band was forced into isolation during COVID, they began to write remotely, sending each other various demos and riffs and building on them via tracks recorded in their respective homes. The result, somewhat serendipitously, was a more fuzzed-out and polished sound— but it was one that still managed to maintain the rough-around-the-edges modus operandi that had been the band’s calling card to that point.

2022’s The Cutting Garden EP laid this sound in the open for the first time. From the wall-of-sound rhythms on “Magic Eye” to the earworm riffs of “Outside The Stars”, this is a clear advancement of the atmosphere they developed across their first two EPs and bevy of singles— a refinement of the intentions behind their layered guitars and carefully arranged instrumentals.

By the time they finished that EP and signed with Kanine Records, the band already had a concrete idea for Spiral Bound forming in their minds. Over time, they had honed their songwriting approach— moving from the early days of unformed demos to a more polished and streamlined process— and that gave Croarkin and Bendis the confidence that they could push their sound forward into a full-length project.  

“When [Kevin] brought ‘Brush Pile,’... the core of the song was very obviously there,” said Croarkin, “Whereas in the past, it was sometimes more just like, ‘This is the idea— we've got the vocal melody and some other things that are maybe happening around there.’ But now it's a little bit more fully fleshed out. There's still room on all these things for everybody to add their flavor, but I feel like they’ve become a little bit more baked.”

Ultimately, Diary decided it was better to release another EP before turning to Spiral Bound, taking four tracks that were originally supposed to be on the album and packaging them into 2024’s Speedboat.

But ultimately, that decision represented more than just a delay in the album-writing process. As time went on, they gave themselves a wider berth to work on Spiral Bound, incorporating their newly-formed tastes and allowing themselves to fully explore the guitar-driven pop sound that they had set out to express at the outset of Diary.

“Having time lets you explore different sounds and find new sounds,” said Bendis, “And if we put this record out three years ago, I know that probably half these songs wouldn't have been on there. We weren't listening to The Happy Mondays; we weren't listening to as much psychedelia or different things like that. Some songs are several years old, but other ones are really sort of new and really fun to play because it's like exploring a new territory for us.”

The result is, in a way, a showcase of the various modes of expression that Diary has formed over its decade of existence. Tracks like “Keep Comin’ Up,” “The Same Door,” and “Asterisk” form the sonic foundations of the album, relaying the flange-tinged pop sound that the band has mastered over the years. But the atmospheric choruses of tracks like “Spin the Bottle” and the soaring lead lines of tracks like “Living Like A Bat” take the project into another sphere entirely— one that displays a unique comfort in the project’s ranging experimentations.

Now, as the band basks in the release of their debut, they’re planning on hitting the touring circuit as hard as ever, carrying the momentum from their first UK tour last year in full support of what Spiral Bound represents to the band— a subtle recognition of every sonic thread that has fed into their pop-tinged sound since their formation, but also a profound evolution of what Diary has put forth to this point in their catalogue.