Biography
Taking their moniker from the protagonist of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night, the Melbourne-based indie-rock foursome Dick Diver came together in Australia during 2008. Guitarists Rupert Edwards and Alistair McKay, drummer Steph Hughes, and bassist Al Montfort—who has also performed with Total Control, Lower Plenty, and UV Race—drew on the warmly melodic pop of fellow Australians the Go-Betweens as well as the intricate guitar textures associated with Television and Yo La Tengo. Their debut EP, Arks Up, appeared on Chapter Records in 2009 and marked the start of an ongoing partnership with producer Mikey Young of Total Control and Eddy Current Suppression Ring. While Edwards and McKay handled most of the songwriting for that release, the entire group contributed material and vocals to the follow-up full-length, New Start Again. Cut inside a remote homestead in Victoria’s High Country, the 2011 album expanded the quartet’s domestic audience and began circulating their music internationally.
Calendar Days, recorded inside a Phillip Island beach house and issued in 2013, earned favorable notices and prompted an extensive world tour that featured appearances at Laneway and Golden Plains. Later that year the band shared a split single with Lower Plenty as part of Matador’s Singles Going Home Alone series, then delivered the standalone “New Name Blues” on Fruits & Flowers in July 2014. Continuing their practice of working in isolated settings, they tracked the next album inside a disused sheep-shearing shed at Apollo Bay, Victoria. Melbourne Florida surfaced in early 2015 through both Chapter and the American imprint Trouble in Mind, becoming the group’s first U.S.-released LP. Bolstered by extensive touring, the record’s reception led Trouble in Mind to reissue the band’s earlier two albums domestically in early 2016.
Calendar Days, recorded inside a Phillip Island beach house and issued in 2013, earned favorable notices and prompted an extensive world tour that featured appearances at Laneway and Golden Plains. Later that year the band shared a split single with Lower Plenty as part of Matador’s Singles Going Home Alone series, then delivered the standalone “New Name Blues” on Fruits & Flowers in July 2014. Continuing their practice of working in isolated settings, they tracked the next album inside a disused sheep-shearing shed at Apollo Bay, Victoria. Melbourne Florida surfaced in early 2015 through both Chapter and the American imprint Trouble in Mind, becoming the group’s first U.S.-released LP. Bolstered by extensive touring, the record’s reception led Trouble in Mind to reissue the band’s earlier two albums domestically in early 2016.
Albums
