In 2015, Dilly Dally released its debut album, Sore, and blew the hell up. The record, a sludgy and glamorous showcase of how to make heavy rock that pops in the modern era, found its way onto multiple Best of the Year lists. The band accrued a global fan base and began touring internationally. Katie Monks, the lead singer and guitarist, with her pull-no-punches lyrics and blistery—shrieking—voice, was touted by some as the next preeminent grunge vocalist. All in all, not too shabby for a first release.

Then in 2016, after a year-long touring schedule, Monks, guitarist Liz Ball, bassist Jimmy Tony, and drummer Benjamin Reinhartz found themselves at an impasse of exhaustion, mental health issues, and a general uncertainty whether or not this was what they wanted to do. Instead of ignoring these issues and pressing on towards possible oblivion, Dilly Dally made the decidedly un-rock ‘n’ roll—and infinitely more mature—decision to dissolve, reassess, and recoup with no guarantee of reforming. There was, for a time, fear that Dilly Dally would be a flash in the pan. Leaving behind a single, explosive, record that made their subsequent absence all the more salient.

You can probably guess how it all resolved, though, because here we are, with Dilly Dally back on the road and their second album, Heaven, making the rounds since its release last September. Heaven succeeds Sore with the same foundation of doomy grunge bangers. It still feels like Reinhartz is trying to give you a concussion with each kick-thump and crash of cymbals. Ball’s guitar is still distorted, psychedelic, and splendid. And I’m still very worried for Monks’ vocal chords. However, something new has sprouted up from the foundational similarities. Where once the lyrics extolled apathy and angst, they now spring words of hope and loving yourself and survival.

I had the pleasure of speaking with Monks, who was enjoying some downtime after an extended tour with FIDLAR, about screaming, the Toronto music scene, and what it was like working on the new album. Check out the interview below.

This interview has been edited for clarity.

Jordan Ranft: I saw you live a few months ago in Oakland and I need to know where you learned you could screech like that, for so long, on stage.

Katie Monks: [laughs] I don’t know! You know with this new record, when people ask what’s different about it vocally, it’s that the first one was more yelling from the stomach, shouting, and on this most recent record there’s more singing and screeching. And the screeching comes more from the throat, a texture you can make with it, and not letting too much air out at one time. It’s a breathing thing, I suppose.

Do you do vocal exercises or coaching to be able to do that?

I’ve never had a vocal coach before. When I was a teenager I used to spend a lot of time in my room experimenting with my vocals. What I’ve always especially wanted to do in music is make sure that the vocals were the most important part. I’ve just always cared a lot about the delivery of the words in the song; almost more than the words in the song themselves.

It certainly makes you guys unique. Do you have to do anything between shows to keep your throat from tearing apart?

The first week of tour, yeah. I’ll need to do some basic vocal warm-ups or a bit of singing. After the first week, it’s like my instrument is all warmed up. It’s still something I have to take care of. It’s still a bit stressful sometimes, you know, wanting to take care of my voice. But to be honest, it’s never not shown up to a show. It’s always arrived.

Dependability is a rare commodity.

It’s definitely humanly possible [the screeching]. Despite the many people who come up to me after the shows and go “How do you do that? How is that possible?” Peoples’ minds are just blown that it’s even possible, and then I try to explain to them how I do it, and they get really bored and just go “Cool, can I buy a record?”

So, you just got off the road playing with FIDLAR. What was the first thing you did when you got home?

I spent about three days straight in a one-bedroom sublet and ordered fifty dollars of Indian food to the house. I realized all the weed dispensaries were closed, so that was kind of annoying. But yeah, I just ate no Mexican food, no eggs and diner food, tried to eat more healthy and lay around and was a hermit. It’s not very interesting; it’s the opposite of tour.

Did you grow up in Toronto?

I grew up in a boring suburb north of Toronto. We had, like, a mall and a bunch of parking lots.

What was the music scene like out there? Were you engaged in the local scene as Dilly Dally was coming up as a band?

Yeah, so, how Liz and I first became friends is, on the weekends, we would take the bus down to the city and go to concerts. We’d go see Death From Above and whatever else was cool back then . . . The Rapture and shit—all that rock music in the early 2000s. We’d come down and we’d go to shows on the weekends, and go shopping for vintage T-shirts. Then we moved here when we were nineteen. We didn’t know anybody, and we would just go to bars and walk up to people who looked like bassists and drummers and ask them if they played music! We started holding try-outs for the band. We thought we were living the dream at the time, just being able to play house parties or play in our apartment with each other. We were just party girls who were obsessed with music. Then, eventually, we found this punk scene, and, I don’t know, I have a hard time talking about it because in the last campaign we really repped that Toronto scene hard, but some people in the scene felt like we were misrepresenting stuff. So attaching it to Dilly Dally’s story—it feels like there’s a lot of aspects to that scene that haven’t been showcased publicly, and we’re one of the bigger bands to come out of it. So, I have a hard time talking about it because all the punks here get fucking mad at me. [laughs]

I don’t think that’s a Toronto-specific thing. I’ve met angry punks from everywhere.

Well, you know how it is. Journalists will talk about it and it’s like, “Oh, but what about this band? And what about that band?” I’m definitely not the leader of the scene. We just have lots of super-talented friends, and there were a lot of cool DIY spaces there back in 2013. Me and Liz finally found people there who wanted to make aggressive music, and it wasn’t this indie-pop stuff, or indie-folk. We always just really liked simple songs that were moody and dark, and not over-thought or over-technical.

I think that makes it accessible in a way that draws in a lot people who might be otherwise afraid of getting into that specific genre because they feel like there’s some barrier there. So I can appreciate that.

Yeah . . . I definitely don’t feel like I get better at writing music. I was thinking about this the other day—the idea of, “Oh, well you need to work on your craft every day.” And I’m at this moment where it’s like, am I spending too much time on the visual aspects of Dilly Dally and not enough time on the music? And getting better at my craft? This feeling that it should just be about the music. But then I thought, I mean shit, so many band’s first record is their best. It’s not one of those things where you need to bang your head against the desk until you come up with something that’s better than what you’ve done before. It should be a natural process.

It’s interesting that you say that because I was thinking about it when I was writing questions. It seems pretty well covered in other interviews that you guys had some tribulations after your debut, and then a hiatus before coming back. I don’t feel the need to dig back into that, but one thing I found fascinating in relation to what you’re saying right now is that there’s a definite leap in emotional complexity and texture between projects. Heaven is so much more fleshed out. So I wonder if maybe you aren’t giving yourself enough credit in terms of developing craft. It seems like you’ve put in some kind of work, you know what I mean?

Yeah, I think there’s definitely been an evolution, and, as I say, it has to happen naturally. I think in a lot of ways we needed to have that break for the band. Because it was like, “Welp, maybe we won’t keep going,” and everybody individually was able to then consciously decide “Yeah! Let’s do this again.” It just had to be a natural process. If it was assumed we would do more, then maybe that would have been dishonest. Maybe every band, after their album cycle, should stop and check in with themselves. Ask, “Why am I doing this, and do I want to continue?”

What was that first day back to work on the new album like after everyone returned on their own accord?

It didn’t really feel like the first day back. Leading up to it, Ben and I would jam, or Liz and I would jam. We jammed with a couple other bassists and tried to work on songs. I certainly was working on music a lot by myself. Then one day I called up Tony and said “If you want to come in for practice, we can play and see how it feels.” It didn’t feel like, “Oh! It’s the first day back and now we’re gonna start a new record!” It was very much one step at a time. And we really needed that. I mean there’s a song on the first album called “Green” that Liz and I wrote when we were eighteen back when we first moved to Toronto and didn’t know anybody. We’d been playing that song for seven years before Sore came out, and then we toured Sore for two years. We were ready to write new music. Not to mention the election and shit that happened in that space in time.

You guys are still touring Heaven right now, so do you think there’ll be another hiatus, then, when that’s done? Is there a third album on the horizon?

I think that this time we’re trying to take care of ourselves and take care of each other a lot more than we did before. Certainly now we want to be a bit more picky with the tours we do and how we spend our time. How we spend our energy. I don’t know, but I have faith that we can carve out creative time within this campaign to plant the seeds for the next record.

That leads into another important question. On Heaven there is this thread of self-care and a celebration of treating yourself with love within these brutal rock songs that you’re playing. I wanted to know what self-care looks like for you guys when you’re on the road now.

It’s tough. I was hanging out with a bunch of other musician friends last night and talking about tour. A friend and I were asking each other, “What’s the dynamic like in your bands? Like, who’s confrontational?” and we both agreed that the worst is when everyone is quiet and passive-aggressive. The thing is that you can be close—best—friends with someone, but the situation and reality of tour is that it’s really hard and really draining emotionally. It’s physically draining too, but emotionally it’s just so stressful. And that’s it. It completely takes over your life for however long you’re on the road, and there is something amazing about that, and beautiful, that you can leave your life behind and any problems you have back home, and you can state that. But you’re also leaving all the good things: your routines, your time alone, your creative times to write music or hang out with your friends. The situation is tough, and I think, now, we all know that. That it’s external. So whenever we butt heads with each other—or feel like we’re going a little crazy, or feeling depressed, or feeling anxious—we can recognize that that’s just what tour does to you. The positives are so amazing, though. The feeling of going onstage every night with your best friends and playing music. It’s still totally worth it. So how do you maintain yourself within that? I guess just, like in our song “Doom,” remember who you are. What’s inside you is sacred. Remember who you really are back home and never lose touch with why you’re doing this, why you’re on the road, why you’re putting yourself through this hell. It’s because you love music, and you’d rather be doing this than anything else.

Okay, those were all the heavy questions, but I got two more. When I came out to see you play in Oakland, we talked for, like, five minutes and you mentioned that with the band you opened for before touring with FIDLAR you felt like you accidentally scared the shit out of the crowds. What happened with that?

[laughs] Yeah! We opened up for Grouplove and those guys are so talented, and I was really excited that they asked us to come on tour. We’d never played venues that big before. But it definitely felt like we would go up onstage every night and people were just like, “Woah . . . weird.” Their eyes were filled with terror, and there were all these little kids who listened to the radio and came to see this pop group play. It was kind of disheartening. It was actually the last tour of that album cycle, and it was the month before and after the Trump election. It was a very weird note to leave things on. But what’s really cool about the FIDLAR tour that we just did is that those little teenagers that saw us open for Grouplove—maybe before they were fourteen? Well, now they’re sixteen or seventeen, and they’re secretly drinking before the show, and they’re wearing vintage T-shirts with stains on them, showing up, getting ready to push people around, and they’re angry and angsty. So a lot of these kids would come up to the merch table and say, “We saw you guys open for Grouplove. We liked you back then, but we really like you guys now.” It feels like we got to plant a seed. So even though we scared the shit out of all of them, I think now some of them are old enough, and angry enough, to understand where we’re coming from.

All right, last question: Could you recommend a movie and an album for people to check out?

One of my favorite movies is Stranger Than Paradise. It’s Jim Jarmusch’s first movie and there’s only, like, three characters in it, and the only song that plays is the one that goes [sings] ‘I’ve got a spell on you, cause you’re miiinnnee.’ It’s all black and white, low budget, minimal. And then for the music, I really love Sinéad O’Connor’s The Lion and The Cobra. It’s one of my favorite records. I think it’s Sinéad’s first record, and it’s so weird and so fun. There’s so many different instruments and vocally it’s insane. One of the most interesting records I’ve ever heard.”

Dilly Dally is getting ready to kick off their headlining tour through Europe, Canada, and the U.S. Buy a ticket to a show near you!







Author Details Jordan Ranft Author Jordan Ranft is a California Bay Area native. His poetry has appeared in ‘Rust+Moth,’ ‘Midway,’ ‘(b)oink,’ and here. He has worked as an arts/culture and music writer for The East Bay Express, Sacramento News & Review, and Brokeassstuart.com. He’s at a point in his life where a lot of his favorite musicians are also his friends. It is delightful. Follow him on twitter, or don’t.

