Four years before DIIV played its first show, Zachary Cole Smith moved into an apartment with a girl he barely knew. They shared a bedroom in Brownsville, a mostly un-gentrified Brooklyn neighborhood that’s generally regarded as one of the borough’s more dangerous areas. When their relationship crumbled a few months into the lease, Smith hopped in his Ford pickup truck and started driving. “I didn’t even know where I was going,” he tells me. “As soon as I went through the Holland Tunnel, I was like, Wow, I’m gone.”

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Smith crossed America slowly, crashing with friends in cities where he had them and sleeping underneath his truck bed where he didn’t. After a misguided attempt to visit his ex-girlfriend in San Diego, he had the idea of reconnecting with his long-estranged father, who was working in a music studio in San Francisco at the time. “All of a sudden, I was living in his house,” Smith says. “I asked him, ‘Hey, is there a job in your studio I could do?’ He was like, ‘Yeah, you can paint it.’ After a week, I was like, ‘Fuck this.’” Desperate for cash, Smith found a girl in San Francisco willing to pay $1000 if he drove her things—packed suitcases, a moped, and a “fuckload” of weed—to the East Coast. So, roughly six months after first setting out, Smith loaded up his car and headed back to where he started. “I drove from San Francisco to New York in five days,” he remembers. “I just wanted to get the fuck home.”

Smith was born in New York, and no matter where on earth his urges take him, the city always lures him back. We’re sitting at a window table inside one of Greenpoint’s traditional Polish bakeries, sipping pink sodas. It’s nearly sundown, and the modest eatery feels peaceful in the soft light of dusk. Looking across the table at Smith, who’s gone by “Cole” since birth, you’d never know that we’re only a couple days from full-blown Brooklyn summer: the small-framed 30-year-old has layered two drastically oversized shirts—one tee, one tunic—atop some ragged beige trousers with gaping knee holes, his shoulder-length yellow hair stuffed under a tan Polo cap. It’s more or less his signature look, midway between a Seattle grunge rocker and a scrawny schoolboy playing dress up in his father’s clothes.

