Zachary Cole Smith quotes:

I'm like part of the Kurt Cobain school of writing lyrics, which is the syntax of the words is more important than... is where it all comes from.

I wouldn't say music is my passion, or my calling, or anything like that. I mean, I don't really believe in that kind of stuff. Life is a series of chance happenings, so I just fell into it.

I went with Beach Fossils and we played 40 shows because we wanted people to see us.

[YSL creative director] Hedi [Slimane] is a music-obsessed guy. I might've originally met him through Sky.

Drugs are fine for you alone at home, but when it comes to being a family, which a band is, it just messes everything up.

I don't think fear necessarily is a core human emotion, but I do think fear of death is something that is at the core of every person's existence.

One of the 12 steps is to admit that you're powerless, but I think that's bullshit. I think it's important to empower yourself by facing the stuff that triggers you.

Generally, I think people are just going through the motions now. There's so much stuff that people are doing today that has already been done. I kind of like that new Savages record, but I don't know why they take themselves so seriously.

I grew up around fashion - my mom was an editor for Vogue. Compared to the music industry, though, I'd say [fashion] is a little bit more disorganized. But it's exciting for me because, when you're a performer, there is a fashion element.

When I read about myself and how writers have focused on negative stuff, it hurts my feelings.

A record is worth 10,000 live shows.

All I'm trying to do is make music that people like and that makes people happy.

For me, it's always been important to have the live band be one thing, and the recorded band be kind of another thing.

I am super-interested in fashion. I love being a person whose clothes get discussed. That makes it more interesting for me.

I didn't want the lyrics to be about specific things in my life, I wanted them to be about generalised experiences I'd had. So when I'm writing about relationships or somebody leaving you or something, a lot of lyrics are partly about failed relationships I'd had, but they were also about my Dad, and being abandoned as a kid.

I don't know if there's anything that would surprise people, because I don't think that anybody knows anything about me at all. There's not much out there. I think I'm going to come out with a pretty dark and troubled record, and it might upset some people.

I feel like every great record is like a world in itself.

I guess I do feel the need to repent. I do feel like I owe the world a great album. I don't know why I feel that way. I just do.

I had these glorified ideas about San Francisco and its drug culture - I thought inspiration would just hit me and I would get these San Francisco drugs in my system and all of a sudden an amazing record would come out. But that's not really what happened at all.

I had to have the record literally taken away from me. I am such a perfectionist.

I spent my life working before I started band. I worked construction, landscaping. I worked in kitchens, cleaned dishes. I worked demolition.

I think that when people download the record they're kind of missing out on part of the experience, because it's really meant to be an immersive experience.

I wanted to show a different side of ourselves. I wanted to see in what ways I could explore something new. I felt like working on a double record would give people a lot to have.

I was raised by all women. I had no men in my life; it was my mom, my sister, and my grandmother. I've never identified as a man. I've always either felt like a boy or something else. I feel really uncomfortable thinking that, technically, I'm supposed to be a man, because I don't feel like one.

If I play Coachella, it's sponsored by a company - that's corporate, too. But we're playing it because we're getting paid and we want to be a part of the festival.

I'm glad that, despite everything, I was able to get work done and finish something. I never finish anything. So just being able to finish record and to make music is a great gift.

In terms of being a kind of popular artist figure and knowing how isolating that is, and knowing what it feels like to be skeptical of people, and to be taken advantage of, especially by your friends. That's a hard to pill to swallow, and we've been through that together, or watched each other go through it. It helps to have somebody that close to you who can relate. I can say with some confidence that I feel like Sky saved my life.

It's not like I had a breakdown, though it kind of felt like it at the time. I agreed to everything that happened. You can't really be at work and be like, "That's it. I've had too much. I'm going home."

It's pretty easy to lose money on tour - most bands do on their first couple of tours. We're more established, but I think it was just poorly booked. It was a mess from the get-go.

It's so easy to hate something. It's harder to genuinely appreciate something.

It's this funny thing now: You sign up to be a musician because you want to write music, but you don't spend your time writing music. Instead, you go around the world selling the music you've already made.

It's totally true: Ariel, Christopher Owens, me, and Courtney Love, all in Saint Laurent ads, all with the same haircut.

I've already had a hard time dealing with some of the trappings of success and turned to some pretty stereotypical escape routes - ways of escaping my own reality and falling into some pretty clichéd situations.

I've tried to be clear about who I am, and be as open as possible with the press, and speak extremely candidly and openly about stuff. I feel like in almost every instance, it's completely backfired, and I feel like people have all these kind of absurd ideas about the way I think about myself, and my own self-identity.

Music is an opportunity to say every single thing that you want to say. People will pore over whatever you say and however you say it and, for me, it represents complete freedom of speech.

Music is much more of a multimedia sort of thing than I expected.

Music journalists are some of the lazy, most uninspired, dull people I've ever met.

My mom worked at [American] Vogue before I was born. She has always been fashion-minded. I grew up with original Yves Saint Laurent sketches on the wall in our house. A lot of that rubbed off on me.

Nobody really wanted to do that one European tour. For one, it was budgeted to lose money. They would've made something, but I would've lost a lot of money.

Obviously there's so much about me on the Internet that you can turn against me, and you can make me into any person you want.

People are going to be way more patient listening to what I have to say now. I don't have five seconds to get their attention, I have five minutes. That's a huge window.

Recovery culture teaches you that you have to repent. I don't think that's necessary.

Some kid can say, "Hey, I really want you to play my town in Switzerland, or Sweden, or Latvia," and they could have a fun night at the show. On the other hand, all those kids could have a record that means something to them in a more personal way a couple months down the road. The live band is a really important thing for us, but my focus is on the album now.

Somebody who knows all about how to make the record, or how to make records, they know how to work the EQ and they know how to work the stuff, but they don't know what I want it to sound like. So it's just easier for me to do it myself.

The idea is: You played to 100 people this week in Europe, and then next week you can play to 200. It's an investment in that territory. But it can lose money because it's very expensive to go to Europe. You can't really just say, like, "Oh, we're gonna take our van and drive to California tomorrow." It's more like, "Oh, we have to fly to London and rent three guitar amps, a bass amp, drums; buy all these flights for four people; hire a driver."

The music starts as being way separate from the lyrics, and I write - I have notebooks that I fill with drawings and just words, and stuff that I've written.

The touring band is DIIV, and the songs are always written with them in mind. But the new record is going to be more "me."

There are a million things out there every single day that trigger me - songs, smells, even the season that we're in, fall. Something about the air.

There are just some things that you can't deny.

There's a lot of stuff that I've been through in my life in the past couple of months that I don't really want to share with people who are close to me, but I have no option if it's my art.

There's all these people involved, and it becomes this huge machine - it stops being just me making my own little songs for myself, or for the world. And it's hard to stop the machine. If you want to take time to write a record, they're like, "OK, tour through March, April, and June, then you can take a few weeks off to record in July before getting back on the road for the European festival circuit." After a while, I had to put my foot down.

There's positive attention and there's negative attention - negative attention is easy, positive attention requires actual hard work.

Three years between records is longer than average. Double albums are much more of a statement. I really wanted to put myself out there as much as I possibly could.

To be told that you're the voice of your generation is such an incredible amount of pressure, and I haven't faced that. Maybe by the time our third record rolls around, I will. My goals are to be a band like that in five years. At the moment, though, I can't really relate in any sense to the scale that Kurt Cobain fame has reached.

We were a commodity used by corporations to make their brand look fashionable, but then they used us to keep kids out of venues.

What I wanted was just to make music, and so, originally I just wanted to hide behind the album cover of the last record, and I wanted it to be almost anonymous.

You can't show somebody what it's like to experience loss, but you can soundtrack it and help them experience their own loss. I am so lucky to have this venue to be able to say and talk about all the stuff I've been through.