The arrest coincided with a period when Smith was in the throes of his addiction and wasn’t finishing any work. “The material just wasn’t there,” says Mike Sniper, the founder of DIIV’s label, Captured Tracks. “It was this hump to get over.” Of course, there’s a long tradition of rock musicians using heroin to inspire their best music—think Lou Reed or Keith Richards—but Smith found no truth in such myths. “You can’t write music when you’re high,” he says plainly. “You can’t do much of anything productive.”

“Dopamine” was one of the first songs Smith wrote after leaving rehab in January 2014, three months after the arrest. (He says he went to rehab of his own volition, after anticipating a judge would order him to attend.) Last September, the song was released as Is the Is Are’s first single. “Dopamine” is a clash of styles—an echoing guitar progression matched against manic vocals that confront mortality while describing the trembling grip of a cocaine and heroin-fueled trip. “Eardrums shaking, years start weighing me down,” he sings. “Buried deep in a heroin sleep.” Smith shared the track’s lyrics online, so that its message could not be misunderstood. “When I see kids with no experience with anything talking about ‘Dopamine’ as a heroin record, I want it to be a cautionary tale,” he says. “Look at the words. Look at what happened to me.”

DIIV: "Dopamine" (via SoundCloud)

Much of Is the Is Are is informed by Smith’s experiences from this time: his struggle with heroin, his self-doubt over his art, his relationship with Ferreira. “I’m not a storyteller,” he says. “I’m just telling my own story, in a way.” He describes himself as a cloud hovering over Ferreira’s light, a metaphor employed on “Dopamine.” “I hope that she doesn’t feel that way, but I sometimes did,” he says. “For her to be caught up in that just because she was in the car with an out-of-control person… the fact that she stuck by me after all that shit is just crazy.” (Ferreira declined to comment for this article.)

Smith was in rehab for 12 days, where he says he kicked the habit, and many of the songs on Is the Is Are were written soon after he got out. “Take Your Time” addresses recovery culture, while a windswept track called “Bent (Roi’s Song)” was inspired by a psychic who told Ferreira that if Smith didn’t stop using drugs, one of his friends would die. Smith took it as a warning about two friends struggling with substance abuse. “I saw you with a very loose grip on your tight ship,” he sings on the track, calling back to a Cat Power lyric. “And I lost you when you said one hit couldn’t hurt a bit.” Both friends have since sobered up; Smith calls “Bent” his favorite song on the album.

DIIV: "Bent (Roi's Song)" (via SoundCloud)

Most of Is the Is Are took full form at the beginning of 2015, when DIIV decamped to Los Angeles to rehearse at a warehouse. Since Smith was also mixing the band’s music for the first time, he was free to follow every creative impulse—a process that stretched through most of last year. Kurt Feldman, an audio engineer who worked with Smith over the summer, describes him as the kind of artist who gets to the end of a project and can’t let it go.

Is the Is Are isn’t a radical departure from Oshin’s crystalline guitar lines and lockstep rhythm section—as Smith puts it, they’ll always sound like DIIV—but it’s clearly the work of a more mature artist. Along with appearing on a harrowing song called “Blue Boredom” and inspiring a part of the album’s emotional core, Ferreira also guided him toward being a more diligent lyricist, as he drew from literary influences like Frank O’Hara and Sherman Alexie. His aim was to make Is the Is Are sound more insistent than Oshin, shedding the vague “vibe” of their reverb-heavy sound without losing their characteristic dreaminess.

Smith used the piercing and noisy textures of Sonic Youth’s Bad Moon Rising as a touchpoint, but despite that artful influence, DIIV are probably closer to the Cure and the Smashing Pumpkins—bands that were unapologetically earnest about their exposed feelings. Because of the way they look and the world they live in, DIIV register as a collection of weird hipsters in big shirts, but their appeal is deeply resonant for people who see past the affectation. They tap into an emotion the Japanese call setsunai, a sort of bittersweet longing for something very dear.