DIIV’s Zachary Cole Smith one year after LA’s wildfires: “It feels like swimming in trauma”

Now 12 months on from having his family home destroyed by wildfires in Los Angeles, DIIV frontman Zachary Cole Smith has spoken to NME about spending a year “swimming in trauma”. READ MORE: LA music community tell us about “tragic” impact of wildfires: “This will be felt for years” The musician’s house was burned down in the Eaton wildfire that destroyed a substantial part of the city’s Altadena neighbourhood last January. Smith spoke to NME about how the experience would “probably take the rest of our lives to process” but also praised the resilience of his local community in the aftermath. The fires, which started on January 7, 2025, ended up being the deadliest and costliest in the region’s history - they were eventually linked to more than 400 indirect deaths and caused an estimated $135-150billion in damage . Los Angeles’ music community was hard-hit by the disaster , with one charity MusiCares having financially supporting 3200 music professionals . Smith, like more than 200,000 residents across Los Angeles, was forced to evacuate after a series of fires broke out in the first week of last year. The musician, his seven-month pregnant wife Dani and two-year-old son sought safety at a nearby hotel. The rapidly-travelling Eaton blaze quickly engulfed their neighbourhood - by the next day their home was gone. Speaking one year on, Smith said that he and other fire-affected people in the city continue to face a number of major difficulties. Recommended “Navigating this new environment is really challenging,” he said. “Some of that is really bureaucratic, some of it is really personal. With the loss side of things, I think it’ll take us the rest of our lives to process - it’s a long thing.” The 41-year-old said that he’s grateful for his young family, saying “trying to keep everything normal for them has been a distracting force. You have to pretend everything’s normal, when everything is far from it. “Even on that first morning finding out about the scale of the destruction we had to be like ‘Oh, good morning Roy! Would you like a juice box?’” Hardly anything survived at the Smiths’ property. A GoFundMe campaign, launched at the time by the family’s friend Lindsey Hardman , aimed to raise funds to support the Smiths who lost items ranging from their family car to music instruments. Smith recalled the “heavy” experience of returning to the site of his home for the first time, “getting to our block, turning onto our street was a crazy, sinking, doom feeling.” He continued: “All around was just like farmland or something covered in chimneys. It was a bizarre landscape.” Like other fire-affected Angelinos, Smith subsequently spent weeks combing through the warm ashes of his house searching for any surviving items and memories. “At the grocery store they had, like, the Red Cross and they’d give you a bucket and some tools to sift through all the shit on your property. I spent a lot of time doing that. Everyday...

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