Sore, is the debut record from Toronto’s Dilly Dally is a dark and fragile post-punk album that deeply concerns itself with gender dynamics and sexual expression. Despite clear feminist underpinnings, all these girls had in mind at the time was making rock music that reflected their experience. “We were really just trying to make a rock album,” lead singer Katie Monks told me in an interview earlier this year. Then her fellow founding member Liz Ball quickly followed that up: “[Sore] is obviously resonating really deeply for both sexes. Which is the goal, and which is quite feminist I guess.” Whatever the intention, the result is clear: Sore is a combustible, seething collection of honey-sweet, venomous rock songs that achieved all the goals Monks and Ball might have had and more. Dilly Dally burned their way to the top, pegging themselves as one of this year’s most exciting bands to watch, and establishing Toronto’s burgeoning rock scene in the process
Thought November 1st meant all the scares were gone for another year? Dilly Dally are upping the fear factor with their new video for ‘The Touch’.
While the phrase itself means “to move or act too slowly,” the rise of this Toronto based bandDilly Dally has been anything but. On their debut album, Sore, the band transform their love of ’90s bands like The Pixies and Nirvana into a dynamic, powerful set of songs, punctuated by the ragged, raw vocals of frontwoman Katie Monks.
Today’s KEXP Song of the Day is particularly special. Monks explained to Stereogum, “I wrote this song for a friend of mine who was having suicidal thoughts. I felt this huge sense of urgency, and wanted to nurture him in anyway I possible could: sexually, emotionally, and then finally realized that I could help him through music. It was all very instinctual. The song attempts to reach him in his dark place, and then lure him away from there. The chorus in this song is very sweet and gentle. It is meant to be comforting and remind him of romance and the softness of a woman’s touch. If that isn’t enough to live for, than I don’t know what is.”
Dilly Dally were just in Seattle last month, and will be heading to the UK in early 2016. check out this video, directed by David Waldman, a Toronto-based music photographer of over ten years.
Shaky, blown-out, black-and-white footage of the band’s raw-as-sushi performance is intercut with that of black cats, pointy nails, black lingerie and whips.
‘The Touch’ is taken from Dilly Dally’s debut album ‘Sore’, out now on Partisan. Read DIY’s 4-star review of the record, and catch up with our recent chat with the band, where they talk about egging ex-boyfriends’ houses. Charming.
The Toronto four-piece’s blazing full-length debut, Sore, has earned rave reviews, and their live show turned heads at this year’s CMJ festival. “It feels more natural for me to be onstage than it feels anywhere else in my life — it’s like the opposite of stage fright,” says singer-guitarist Katie Monks, who founded Dilly Dally with guitarist Liz Ball, her best friend from high school. “It’s like an alternate life where you can speak a language that’s a lot more free.” Along with powerful originals like “Snake Head” and “The Touch,” their recent sets have included a memorably surly cover of Drake’s “Know Yourself.” “Nobody here calls Toronto ‘the 6’ at all,” Monks notes. “So there’s a layer of sarcasm to the cover. But it’s still a fucking awesome song! Drake is so honest about being lame that it’s endearing.”
They Say: Monks says her vocal cords are doing just fine, thank you, despite some concern-trolling she’s encountered lately. “I resent the people who wrote about the record, like, ‘Let’s see how her voice holds up on tour,'” she says. “I’m like, what the hell?! I’ve been playing shows for six years. I just do my half-assed vocal warm-up of singing Sinead O’Connor before we go onstage, and that’s it, really.”
“Purple Rage” finds post-breakup liberation in a rowdy mosh pit. “This relationship I was in fizzled out, and I was left with these negative feelings that I wasn’t good enough,” Monks says. “That song is me fantasizing about a new life and a new Katie.”
It’s kind of great, isn’t it, when you encounter a band that is new (to you) yet brings with it a sound and aesthetic that slots perfectly, filling some kind of void you never quite realised was actually there. Dilly Dally are here
Sore’s a good word to describe how you might feel after spinning through Dilly Dally’s debut album of the same name. Katie Monks’ scratchy, full-blooded howl will reel you in, and their whip-smart lyrics and pulverizing intensity will keep you coming back time and time again for another cathartic fix. Their loud, brash, toweringly epic style of rock feels is a front for the more vulnerable feelings underneath, and that only adds to their might
Of course, Dilly Dally aren’t new in the freshly-hatched-into-the-world-of-music sense. Their biography tells of founders Katie Monks and Liz Ball’s long musical connection, of six years ‘drenched in the Toronto music scene’, of ‘working shit jobs, being in debt, partying too much and hustling in a band’. By new I mean in the sense that their debut album, Sore, has just been released, and that their music is just starting to be more widely heard and appreciated.
But if said music sounds fresh it also sounds like it ought always to have been around. The album opens with a blur of fuzzed guitar and then a brilliantly roared count in, “one… two… three… four…”, in Monks’ already-shredded, raw and grainy voice. After that guitars crash, but lighter harmonies also surface, while the lyrics – deliberately sketchy, semi-audible, making the listener strain to understand, work at it, work it out – arrive with a delivery that is at once guttural, poetic (“mercuries are falling from her eyes again”) and sensual, the catches in the vocal a match for the buzz of the frenetic instrumentation. It’s quite a start, an invigorating and deeply authentic invocation of the song’s title: ‘Desire’, served up in an impressionistic but never euphemistic or coy way.
These are songs about lust and life, about feelings and experiences, but told in such a way that they sound box-fresh. There’s anger, cathartically expressed on the likes of the terrific, bracing ‘Purple Rage’ and ‘Snake Head’ (someone or something accused of “fucking with my shit” gets very short shrift), there’s loads of sex: from the opener’s furious lust to The Touch with its panting and yowling. ‘Next Gold’ tells of “making love in the parlour” while, in ‘Green’, Monks “wants you naked in my kitchen making me breakfast”, which seems like a fair enough demand tbh.
One of several highlights is ‘Snake Head’, a herky-jerky period piece (sorry) that anyone who has ever menstruated will relate to in spades. When Monks sing/screams that “snakes are coming out of my head / And there’s blood between my legs”, or matter-of-factly bemoans the fact that “these painkillers are no fun” it makes you wonder where all the other funny-and-furious, real and raw songs of women’s everyday experiences are, so apposite and essential does it sound.
Also wonderful are ‘Next Gold’ – a song of contrasts, the guitar sounds switching from indie-jangle to MBV-alike shred, the vocals from high harmonious “oohs” to gruff growls – and the exhilarating, bracing ‘Purple Rage’ that follows. This great sequence, more or less in the album’s centre, continues with ‘Get To You’, slightly slower of pace and quieter of voice, downbeat and utterly compelling.
This is a band that clearly relish this type of switch, not only with their mid song loud/quiet changeovers à la Pixies (Witch Man, Ice Cream), but also by throwing in curveballs that change the album’s internal trajectory. It’s one such moment that closes the album, piano ballad (yes, really) ‘Burned By the Cold’: sincere, utterly lacking in guitar noise, its intensity conveyed this time solely by the raspy vocal. That it makes no less of an impact than the fantastic confections of noise and thunder that precede it only goes to demonstrate the nous behind the fury, the musical smarts governing the debut of this terrific new band. Dilly Dally, where the hell have you been? We’ve been waiting for you.
When I hear a couple of tunes from a band like Toronto’s Dilly Dally and I am reminded of a time when I might not have been cool, but at least my body didn’t hurt as much. Dilly Dally is a sonic blast, heavily influenced by all things Deal. Here’s a little snippet from lead singer KatieMonks, “Sore is an album about rebirth,” she says, “hence its disgusting guitar tones and constant moaning. What can I say, happiness is a struggle, but the last thing I’d ever want you or anyone else to do is give up that fight.” Sore will be released on October 9th via the fine folks at Partisan Records. In the meantime, enjoy a couple of tracks below at a very loud volume
For Toronto band Dilly Dally, the story isn’t all that different. Formed by high school friends Katie Monks (sister of Tokyo Police Club’s David Monks) and Liz Ball back in 2009, the pair got together with little more in their pockets than a semester each of post-secondary, blind faith, and youthful wonder.
“Liz and I are a couple of weirdos,” says Monks jokingly over the phone. “Right from the start, we’ve always had the attitude that our band could take over the fucking world [laughs]! Even if we didn’t know how it was going to happen, we believed blindly in the project and have been playing shows every month in this city for the last four years.” Although it took them nearly that long to secure the right line up, their motivation hasn’t as of yet wavered. In fact, the recent addition of bassist Jimmy Tony Billy Rowlinson (Mexican Slang) and drummer Benjamin Reinhartz (Beliefs) has served the band well. With a mutual appreciation for slurred poetry, pop ballads, and grunge-heavy guitars, the newfound collaborative energy has ignited Dilly Dally’s live show and injected a whole new level of aggression into their sound.
Dilly Dally may be Toronto’s new purveyor’s of late-80’s alterna-worship, but while Katie Monks can yowl like both Frank Black and Kim Deal, some of their best hooks are found in lead guitarist Liz Ball’s Santiago-esque melodies. A shining example is “Candy Mountain,” an anthem of social alienation in which sparse verses dive headfirst into choruses soaked in fuzz. If its title is any indication, think less “Big Rock Candy Mountain,” and more Psychocandy.
The Canadian group Dilly Dally exude a combination of nonchalance and expertly-concealed nervousness. Their songs are bloody-knuckled marvels, big, hammering numbers that are grainy and gritty and yet still centered around clear and cunning pop melodies. The reference points are all late ’90s – there are nods to Nirvana and L7 in both the charred scrap metal guitars and Katie Monks’s roaring, blown-throat vocals. Their force and power was breathtaking, the sound of a band discovering itself in real-time and reveling in the possibilities.
The Canadian group Dilly Dally exude a combination of nonchalance and expertly-concealed nervousness. Their songs are bloody-knuckled marvels, big, hammering numbers that are grainy and gritty and yet still centered around clear and cunning pop melodies . The reference points are all late ’90s – there are nods to Nirvana and L7 in both the charred scrap metal guitars and Katie Monks’s roaring, blown-throat vocals. Their force and power was breathtaking, the sound of a band discovering itself in real-time and reveling in the possibilities.
Performing at the CMJ week in New York City Dilly Dally from Toronto were one of the bands everyone wanted to see, so when they played early Friday they exceeded everyones expectations. Their sound is great Singer and guitarist Kate Monks has a voice that can turn to a roar at any given moment their sound is more mid tempo Indie rock but they are no slackers on stage clearly a band thats locked in and look like they no where they are going and the best way to get there. To date there has only been a couple of songs from Dilly Dally but if their set is anything to go by they have a pretty promising album.
The Fat Angel Sings 