“I think people could tell we were pretty obsessed with it, and we didn’t do a lot else,” Andrews said. “Because of the band, we were seen as extroverted and popular in school, and I didn’t want to be in that. I wasn’t partying or hanging out with people, I just wanted to go home and make music. I’ve always felt like I’m here, but I’m not really doing the same things. I want to be able to be in this world and not have to be affected by the same things; I want to be able to be as free as I can.”

Some pretty astronomical odds were also involved in bringing the band together – not only did Andrews’ father, an emergency doctor, meet the Bassett siblings’ father after putting a tube in his chest in the ICU after a bad biking accident in Vernon, BC, but Andrews also tells a personal story about the tragic circumstances of his own birth on the album’s closing track, “ALL I HAVE.”

“Something that I’ve never talked about in music is my relationship with my grandfather on my dad’s side,” Andrews says. “We had an album in the past that I named after him, and I thought I was very close with him. He died in 2016 and I didn’t react, and I couldn’t understand why I wasn’t affected by it. He had a son that was his first child, and that kid drowned when he was two. The only reason my dad was born is because they wanted to have another kid. I’m here because someone died, and I always felt like I owed him more than I expressed.”

With all of that weighing over them, the band knew they had to take a wild swing at the fences. Another part of what inspired the band, formerly with more of a Glass Animals-esque indie-pop sound, to take a full-on dive into the boundless, undefinable experimentation that you might find on two of the albums that inspired them the most – Kanye West’s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy and Yeezus – was the similar desensitization they felt in the COVID years, and in today’s climate of mindless social media scrolling. “You can go on your phone and see people get blown up or something, and then just keep scrolling, or go to the grocery store after that,” Andrews says.

The album’s title, MODERATION, partially comes from Andrews’ increased awareness about his leaning into vices of consumption when locked up at home during a pandemic, as well as the band’s less-than-healthy creation schedules that often involved sleepless nights trying to get things right. The band put up an Instagram post about returning to the spotlight where they said “It felt like we disappeared for two years and reemerged as very different people, with different goals, different priorities, and different horizons than on the last album.”

“We definitely started to look at music differently – we just wanted to be as honest as we could,” Andrews says. “Sometimes in the past, we’ve been making things where we’re kind of leaning into a sound for the sake of doing so, and not really for ourselves. COVID happened, and it happened, but it didn’t really happen to us. We were totally fine, just in our house, government money in our bank account. We went from that right into driving from Vancouver to SXSW, and being back out in the world. I had to catch up on all these experiences I didn’t have.”

The idea of finding a healthy balance of moderation also applied to the sound of the album – which is where Injeti’s assistance arrived in a big way, telling them that simplification would lead to the more hard-hitting sound they were searching for. It’s interesting that the aforementioned Kanye albums are often dubbed his most maximalist and his most minimalist works – you wouldn’t expect the vibes that they respectively carry to match too well. With daysormay’s vision board of moderation, however, they managed to achieve it, juxtaposing choral moments with fuzzy, industrial percussion.

“It’s like an audio Renaissance painting,” Carson says of My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. “It’s very vivid, you can hear the colours. We wanted to be really colourful, really in your face, and that was the biggest thing. Growing up and writing music, we always had these dense and elaborate arrangements, overthinking stuff a lot. We wanted to make something as hard-hitting as possible with the least amount that we can do. Not obsessing too much about the sound design and realizing we love stuff that’s really hard, heavy and distorted.”

As creatives, it seems like the main throughline that connects daysormay and Chin Injeti is their desire of wanting to surprise their listeners – whether it means making the kind of music that some wouldn’t expect to come from people of certain backgrounds, as Injeti has been advocating for throughout his career, or wanting to reinvent themselves and expand their fans’ musical horizons with each release, something that the trio hope can instill a similar joy that they found in showing each other music from a wide variety of genres and sounds on the way to band practice.

“I’ve always been a fan of hybrid artists, and I just love that they were going in that direction,” Injeti says. “We put each other onto stuff, and it’s more exciting that way. We’re just trying to get each other excited in the room while we’re making it, and trying to keep it fresh for ourselves,” Carson adds.

There’s another Instagram post where Injeti talks about being drawn to daysormay because “It was such a pleasure to record with a group of people that weren’t in a rush, that weren’t putting a timeline on creativity, and their outlook on life.” In a world that seems to be moving in the opposite direction, as big stars jockey to be putting out as much content as they possibly can to keep attention pointed at them, it’s a refreshing approach.

“Artist development is such a dead art form, because everybody wants the next thing right away, otherwise your career is not working, right? And the fact that these guys took their time to just really figure out who they wanted to be on this record, and they exercised that right to do so, every artist can do that, but they don’t. The fact that they did it really shows in the work,” Injeti says.

At that comment from his producer, Carson laughs and says, “Yeah, we said to the label, ‘OK, we’ll see you in a year.’” “We basically didn’t talk to them. They were like, ‘Are you still alive?’” his brother adds. “We do have our little core of fans, and they’ve been down to wait because they’re still here, which is amazing. While we’re at this point, there’s no need to rush, really.”

Over the years, the band have had a lot of conversations about the idea of making music that is bigger than themselves, something that they feel like one of their favourite bands, Rage Against the Machine, have achieved many times over. That might mean tackling political issues and offering perspectives on today’s social climate – which they’ve done before – but at the moment, it mostly just means that they want to focus on cultivating community.

“In doing what we’re doing, the most important thing is people.”

— Carson Bassett (daysormay)

“In doing what we’re doing, the most important thing is people,” Nolan says. “Spotify, all these things that everyone feels like is the most important, actually come after the people listening to your music. So, we’ve been talking about ‘How do we foster a community over growing our streams. How do we get more real people here?’

“And have them connect with each other, too,” he continues. “We have like a group of maybe five OG fans who are still friends and fly all over the world to see each other. That’s so cool to see that they met because of our music and they’re like, lifelong friends. So more of that!”

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