DIIV songwriter Zachary Cole Smith has spoken about the way addiction is viewed through the prism of the media. The American artist has been through some dark times, with addiction issues almost re-railing his career. Arrested in 2013 alongside then-partner Sky Ferreira , he has been through treatment, and emerged into a period of personal and creative security.
New album ‘Frog In Boiling Water’ is out now , but many reviews have chosen to view the record through the lens of his experiences with addiction. Deciding to offer a counter narrative, Zachary Cole Smith posted a thought-provoking mini-essay on Twitter / x . — — Hi – something that’s been on my mind for the last few days in regards to general discourse around our band but especially @pitchfork ’s recent review of our record that I wanted to address and then hopefully move on from: Addiction is a disease.
It’s hard to view one’s own past living through the horrors of that disease as a type of scarlet letter that can’t be shaken even after many years of intense self-work in sobriety within a program of recovery. The past is unchangeable, for sure, and much of any spiritual program of recovery deals in acceptance of that past, alongside a head-on confrontation of the defects of one’s own character which guided its construction. Still, living today as a sober person, a husband and a parent, it’s difficult to see my own work met with an unwillingness to accept me as the person I’ve worked so dili.
