It’s 365 days and 12 months a year of DD/MM/YYYY

By Jordyn Marcellus

For DD/MM/YYYY (“day month year”), making music is a 24/7, 365 days a year gig. Yet somehow in the hustle and bustle of transcontinental rock touring, they found some time to actually record a new album, Black Squares, dropping via digital release next week.


The band has spent their time crisscrossing Canada and the United States ad nauseam, playing innumerable basement shows and even booking a rad pool party at a YMCA located in a mining town in northern Alberta.


With Square, the band has refined their sound and added some jazz experimentalism to help mix things up a bit. They recorded with Roger Leavens at Boombox Sound– a music and film design company– which was an atypical studio for the band to record in.


“What he does in the day is that he records jingles and does overdubs for video games,” says drummer Moshe Rosenberg. “But at night, he likes to rock out so we come over there to crank up the volume.”


Since they were recording in a space that was meant for commercial work, the band wasn’t able to spend their waking daytime hours in the recording studio. Rosenberg says the stop-start recording process helped make the album take even longer in the minds of the band.


“When we were recording it was at night and usually only for three hours at a time,” says Rosenberg. “You just spend most of your time hearing things back, setting up microphones, so it felt like we were working on it for eight months or something.”


The time spent on the record shows though. It’s easily their most refined album to date, retaining the fluid, skronky noise-punk of their past albums, but with longer, more exploratory tracks. There’s a little less of DD/MM/YYYY’s trademark musical-ADD, adding a lot more maturity to the mix.


“We took all the different noises in our heads and we actually went ahead and refined them,” says Rosenberg. “We were picky with it. In previous albums, we just wanted to give everybody insight into what we were thinking. We didn’t care if it was a complete thought. We just wanted to give them what we were thinking. This time around we chose the highlights.”


Because of the occasional frustrations of the logistics of record distribution, the boys in DD/MM/YYYY felt releasing Squares digital-only in the first month was the best plan. Hard copy purists will still be able to get their own CD or record a month from now, but the fanatics won’t have to wait. Rosenberg explains it was just a desire to finally get the record complete that spurred the choice.


“It’s been such a long time coming with this album and we just wanted it out already,” he says. “When it comes to releasing stores, I don’t know how it works, but you have to be more strategic about it. With digital, we said, ‘Fuck man, the songs are ready– why don’t we just let people listen?’ “