Following the release of The Sun and Her Scorch last month, indie-pop group Dizzy have given us a track-by-track rundown of the new record.
The four friends from suburban Canada released their second LP The Sun and Her Scorch on July 31, which had followed their 2018 Juno Award-winning debut album, Baby Teeth with NME dubbing the record“[A] dreamy escape from monotonous suburban life,” while CLASH Magazine further praised the album’s “matching fizzing guitar pop melodies with incisive, often very personal lyricism.
They’ve already dropped two singles from the album, most recently ‘The Magician’ following February’s ‘Sunflower’ which was added to triple j.
To celebrate the arrival of the new cord, Dizzy are taking us through a track-by-track run-through of The Sun and Her Scorch.
Check out ‘Sunflower’ by Dizzy:
Dizzy talks us through The Sun and Her Scorch
‘The Magician’
This song started with a vocal arrangement Charlie (Spencer, drums) came up with that can be heard pitch shifted and beneath the track and main melody. I immediately took to it and wrote the first verse and chorus shortly after. The song is about wanting to magically bring a friend of mine who passed away back to life. To me ‘The Magician’ reeks of naivety and innocence in a way that really hurts my heart. Hoping she’ll walk into my gig at the local pub, hoping to see her mom at Sobeys (Canadian Grocery story) just to remember how similar their laughs were. Hoping for magic. It’s a really emotional song for me but is masked by tricky, pretty production to make it sound almost joyful.
Love Music?
Get your daily dose of metal, rock, indie, pop, and everything else in between.
‘Primrose Hill’
‘Primrose Hill’ was written in-between the recording of ‘Heavy’ and ‘Twist’. Charlie and I sat down at a piano one day and he started playing the chords and I started humming the verse and chorus melody. We hashed the structure out pretty quickly and I came back with lyrics shortly after. It’s about being an asshole to the people you love most, and them just taking it because they love you so much. This song made me be brutally honest with myself about how I treat people. I really wanted to give a voice to the character in the song that’s being treated poorly and did so at the bridge. The lyric “anywhere you go, I’ll be there to dote” is meant to reassure the narrator that they’re loved.
‘Ten’
I wrote the chorus for ‘Ten’ in my bedroom on guitar. When we knew we wanted to start writing the second record we went away to a cottage up in Sudbury, ON. I remember pulling the voice note up at the end of the night as we were winding down and everybody being super intrigued. Once we figured out the structure of the tune I was so excited. There are videos of me dancing and singing the song around the cottage while Charlie played the chords out on a keyboard. It’s the most joy I’ve ever gotten out of writing. The next morning I wrote the rest of the song so easily. The lyrics really fell off the bone. The song is about being in love and realizing that you’re going to die one day and will have to say goodbye to that person because of it. That weekend we all had a hard time listening to it. Every listen felt like it sort of took the wind out of your gut- in a good way. Before it was named we just referred to it as the ‘really really sad song’.
‘Good and Right’
‘Good and Right’ was an idea that I had in my voice notes for a long time. It was just the first verse but when I brought it to the guys it really got brought to life. It’s about being afraid and in denial of death and hoping, that if anything, it’s not so bad.
‘Roman Candles’
This song started with a piano idea Alex had brought to the cottage. It came together quickly and, like ‘Ten’, was an easy one to write lyrically. I sent the guys out to the lake for an hour and when they came back the first verse and chorus were written. This song is about being jealous of an old friend who I no longer keep in contact with and who took a more traditional route in life. It deals with a lot of self reflection and feelings of being a failure in your early twenties.
‘Lefty’
‘Lefty’ was another piano idea Alex brought to the cottage. We were very close to writing it off as definitely not a Dizzy song, but a melody came to me quick enough that we didn’t have time to scrap it. It’s about the unhealthy possessive and obsessive tendencies that are common in romantic relationships and are rarely talked about.
‘Sunflower’
‘Sunflower’ started as a voice note of a choir we heard rehearsing at a rec centre one night. Charlie chopped the clip up in Abelton to create the hook that you hear off the bat when you listen and what I think ended up being the heart of ‘Sunflower’. It seemed challenging and different to any other idea we’d worked on and it was intriguing. The chorus melody came first and was accompanied with lyrics I thought were phonetic fillers but ended up being a mantra that means a lot to me now. The song is a 3 and a half minute “snap out of it!” to myself when I’m feeling low, unconfident or not myself. We recorded it at Studio Frisson at Mechanicland in Montreal, QC.
‘Worms’
I really wanted this track to feel like the mantra for the record. I knew once I wrote the lyrics that I wanted them to be the first thing the listener hears when they dive in. It’s a sort of “hello, this is where we’ve been.” The voicemail heard at the beginning is one my Grandma left checking in on me one summer afternoon. The song is about pushing help away when you’re feeling low. ‘Worms’ is the common thread throughout the album, and signifies the space where people hide the worst bits of themselves away from the rest of the world- underground with the worms.
The Sun and Her Scorch is out now via Pod / Inertia Music.
