“Coming to this country and joining the culture with English not being our first language was hard enough let alone then trying to enter into a subculture,” Momo says. “We really didn’t know where we stood. Sometimes when we’d go into venues people were like, ‘What the fuck do these guys think they’re doing?’ and now some of those people are our peers. People have changed and that just took time and no matter what, that just motivated us. We felt like we were the voice of our community and it was a beautiful struggle.”
Momo has dissected this tale a thousand times over and last year’s breakthrough album Pocket Full Of Dreams (featuring the killer single Running It) was proof that the group have more to talk about. “If you listen to Pocket Full Of Dreams there’s isn’t much about our origins in the lyrics; there’s like two songs about it,” he says. “Even though it’s a big part of us it’s not like that’s the only story we can tell. With Concrete Jungle, that was a big part of the story but it seemed like that was the only part people focused on. We certainly weren’t going to rewrite that first album; I’ve got a thousand stories.”
Diafrix did rewrite the second album though, just in a different way, and there is almost an album’s worth of material that has been so far been shelved from Diafrix’s live set. “We started working on the second album and we pretty much had a whole album done but sonically it wasn’t at all where we wanted it to be,” he says. “So we scrapped the whole thing and only took two songs and wrote a whole new album. The album has done exactly what we wanted it to do and we’re very grateful and thankful for that and also for all the people out there spreading the love. Being an independent artist for so long, you know what the hustle and bustle is about so when you get love back it really makes you feel good.”
Diafrix are getting ready for their most extensive tour to date and still riding a high from supporting current hip hop darlings Macklemore & Ryan Lewis. “It was effin’ amazing!” he says. “It was actually ridiculous to be honest. Macklemore is just such a humble dude, I think the whole tour was a shock for him because he didn’t know how big things had gotten here for him. Every single night at every gig he’d be like, ‘Make sure you support Diafrix’ and that was just so overwhelming for us because that was the first time that an artist that we’re supporting has ever done something like that.”
Things may seem to be on the up and up for Diafrix but Momo admits there are always nerves when venturing out on a headline tour. “This is our first more than ten day tour and it’s hard to play in regional areas where you don’t know if you’ve got a following or not and even though it’s music, it’s a business as well,” he says. “Either we’re gonna get there and there’s gonna be no one there or we’ll be drinking champagne afterwards.”
BY KRISSI WEISS
