Diary – Spiral Bound
There is something particularly appropriate about a band called Diary making a debut album that feels like a collection of memories written down during the hours when memory itself becomes unreliable. On Spiral Bound, released on September 4, 2026 through Kanine Records, nights stretch longer than expected, journeys lose their direction, parties dissolve into strange recollections and guitars move between crystalline jangle and enormous clouds of fuzz. The result is an album that draws freely from dream pop, jangle pop, shoegaze, post-punk and psychedelia, while remaining fundamentally attached to something considerably simpler: the pleasure of a beautifully constructed guitar-pop song.
Based in Brooklyn, New York, Diary began with longtime friends Kevin Bendis and Chris Croarkin, brought together by a shared affection for melodic guitars, fuzz pedals and layered vocal harmonies. After several changes in personnel, the group eventually settled into its current five-piece formation with Bendis on vocals and keyboards, Croarkin on guitar and vocals, Jessica Dye on guitar and vocals, Yan Kogan on bass and Adam Sachs on drums.
The band's development towards its first full-length album has been relatively gradual, and its history with Kanine Records predates Spiral Bound. Before signing with the label, Diary had already released two EPs and a string of singles independently, gradually establishing the melodic and atmospheric foundations of their sound. Their relationship with Kanine subsequently developed across their two most recent EPs and a single, meaning that Spiral Bound represents not an introduction to the label but the next stage of an already established collaboration. Extensive performances along the American East Coast, appearances around SXSW and New Colossus, a UK tour and participation in Focus Wales have meanwhile helped Diary move well beyond their immediate New York environment.
Spiral Bound is therefore technically a debut album, but it is neither the work of musicians discovering one another for the first time nor Diary's first release with Kanine Records. Instead, it feels like the culmination of several years of development, both independently and through their existing relationship with a label whose history with indie pop and contemporary shoegaze makes considerable sense in relation to the band's music. Its ten songs, collectively credited to the five members of Diary, have the confidence of a group that has already spent several years learning how its different personalities fit together. Produced by the band alongside Ben Hozie of BODEGA, with mastering by Kurt Feldman, the record lasts just under 34 minutes and rarely wastes that time.
Co-produced by Ben Hozie (of Brooklyn band Bodega) and mastered by Kurt Feldman (The Pains of Being Pure at Heart, The Depreciation Guild), Spiral Bound incorporates elements of jangly indie-rock, '90s shoegaze, '60s psychedelia, and Madchester's danceable beats. Highlights from the album include lead single "Keep Comin' Up," the moody, atmospheric "Drive It," and jangle-pop cut "Spin the Bottle."
What becomes immediately apparent is how reluctant Diary are to allow one particular influence to dominate the album.
The guitars of Croarkin and Dye can sparkle with the clarity associated with jangle pop before suddenly expanding into layers of distortion, while Kogan and Sachs provide a rhythm section capable of moving from straightforward indie rock towards post-punk, motorik rhythms and something considerably more danceable. Bendis and Dye's voices then give these changing surroundings a melodic centre, ensuring that even the album's stranger moments rarely lose contact with pop songwriting.
This is perhaps the most important distinction when approaching Spiral Bound. Diary use shoegaze as a texture rather than treating it as a destination.
The fuzz can become enormous, and there are certainly moments when individual guitars begin dissolving into one another, but Diary rarely seem interested in disappearing completely inside the noise. Beneath the effects there is usually a melody demanding to be remembered, a bass line providing movement or a chorus waiting to emerge from the haze.
That approach gives Spiral Bound a noticeably different character from albums built primarily around sonic weight. Diary's music can become dense, but it also wants to move.
“Keep Comin' Up” provides an excellent introduction to that philosophy. The song combines the rhythmic energy of Madchester with shoegaze guitars, jangling pop and traces of 1960s psychedelia, creating something that feels simultaneously familiar and strangely displaced in time. Its inspiration partly came from the atmosphere surrounding illegal raves held in the British countryside during the 1990s, alongside a more peculiar experience in the woods that gave the song an almost ritualistic quality.
That combination of movement and disorientation becomes important throughout the album. Spiral Bound is filled with the feeling that something is happening after dark, but Diary are less interested in describing the event itself than capturing what remains in the mind afterwards.
This is particularly evident on “Drive It.”
Built around a darker motorik pulse and guitars that bring something of Echo & the Bunnymen and The Chameleons into Diary's vocabulary, the song grew from the memory of a late-night journey in an old car whose power steering had stopped working. Instead of ending the journey, the passengers continued driving and eventually discovered at dawn that they had spent almost an hour travelling in the wrong direction.
It is a wonderfully mundane disaster, but Diary transform it into something much stranger.
The empty roads, exhaustion and gradual distortion of time create the sensation of a journey temporarily detached from ordinary reality. The destination becomes less important than the strange psychological territory created by travelling through darkness while everyone else appears to have disappeared.
That feeling extends across Spiral Bound.
The album does not tell a conventional story, but it frequently behaves like a collection of connected recollections. Certain songs feel as though they belong to the party, others to the journey away from it, while several seem to occupy that peculiar period before sunrise when tiredness begins changing the appearance of familiar places. Relationships, memories and apparently insignificant details move in and out of focus without being forced into a strict chronology.
The title consequently becomes more than a convenient reference to the band's name.
Spiral Bound can be imagined as an actual notebook in which these fragments have accumulated. Some entries are immediate and clearly remembered, while others feel as though they were written several hours later when details had already started to blur. The spiral itself also suggests repetition, returning to similar emotions and places without necessarily experiencing them in exactly the same way.
Musically, Diary achieve something similar by continually rearranging a relatively consistent collection of influences.
“Spin the Bottle” demonstrates how immediate their guitar pop can become, while “Already Dead” introduces an almost pop-punk urgency. “Living Like A Bat” expands towards a broader alternative-rock scale, whereas “In the Tarot” deliberately unsettles the album's established vocabulary by reducing the importance of conventional drums and electric guitars.
Mechanical percussion, cicada sounds and instrumentation resembling a sitar give In the Tarot an unusual atmosphere, while the understated interaction between Bendis and Dye makes the song feel particularly intimate. It is important that this experimentation does not sound like Diary temporarily abandoning their identity. Instead, it reveals how much of that identity exists in the songwriting rather than in a specific combination of guitar pedals.
Jessica Dye's vocal presence is especially valuable throughout the album for this reason. Her contributions introduce another perspective into songs that might otherwise become dominated by Bendis' voice, sometimes creating harmony and elsewhere something closer to a distant presence within the arrangement. On “Spook Rock,” that quality reinforces the album's fascination with memories and figures that seem to move through the music without ever becoming completely tangible.
This interaction between voices also connects Diary with an older tradition of guitar pop that extends well beyond shoegaze.
There are traces of 1960s American psychedelia and The Byrds within their melodic instincts, just as later British guitar music appears in their fascination with jangle, post-punk rhythm and distortion. What makes Spiral Bound feel contemporary is the absence of any need to keep those histories separated.
For Diary, there is no contradiction in allowing a Byrds-like melodic instinct to coexist with shoegaze fuzz, a post-punk bass line or a rhythm inspired by Madchester. These sounds have existed beside one another for decades, and the band treats them as parts of the same available vocabulary.
That attitude places Diary comfortably within a broader generation of American groups for whom shoegaze, indie pop, post-punk and psychedelia are no longer mutually exclusive identities. The difference is that Diary appear particularly determined to retain the accessibility of guitar pop within that mixture.
Even when the production becomes hazy, the songs rarely become abstract.
This may ultimately be what gives Spiral Bound its personality. Diary understand the seductive qualities of distortion and reverb, but they also understand that a wall of guitar becomes considerably more effective when there is a memorable song hiding inside it. Their fuzz does not replace melody; it changes the environment surrounding it.
The rhythm section is equally important in preventing the record from becoming static. Post-punk and motorik influences give several songs a forward momentum that contrasts with the dreamier qualities of the guitars and vocals. Instead of simply floating through its 34 minutes, Spiral Bound repeatedly feels as though it is travelling somewhere, even when, as on Drive It, nobody appears entirely certain where that somewhere might be.
There is consequently a pleasing tension between movement and suspension throughout the album. Diary's rhythms keep pushing ahead while their guitars and voices frequently seem to look backwards, towards memories that become increasingly difficult to separate from imagination.
For a debut album, Spiral Bound is also refreshingly uninterested in providing a definitive answer to what Diary should sound like. Keep Comin' Up can embrace Madchester rhythms and psychedelia, Drive It can enter darker post-punk territory, Already Dead can accelerate towards pop-punk and In the Tarot can remove much of the instrumentation listeners might have assumed was essential to the group.
What connects these songs is not genre consistency but atmosphere, melody and the personality of the musicians playing them.
That makes Spiral Bound feel less like a formal introduction than a notebook discovered after a particularly long night.
Some pages contain clear memories, while others preserve only impressions. There are parties and cars, strange journeys, relationships, glimpses of people who may already have disappeared and moments when the distinction between exhaustion and exhilaration becomes difficult to maintain. Around all of them are guitars that shimmer, jangle and occasionally erupt into noise without allowing the songs underneath to disappear.
Diary have therefore made a shoegaze record that never seems particularly interested in proving how shoegaze it can be. They have made a post-punk record without surrendering themselves to darkness and a dream-pop record that frequently possesses too much nervous energy to remain completely dreamlike.
More importantly, they have made a very good guitar-pop album.
And as Asterisk brings these ten songs to their conclusion, Spiral Bound leaves behind the peculiar sensation of returning home as the first daylight begins appearing through the windows. The night has technically ended, but fragments of it remain, slightly rearranged by memory and already beginning to acquire the unreality of something dreamed.
For Diary, Spiral Bound is an appropriate title because this debut does not feel like a perfectly ordered account of where they have been. It feels like a collection of pages filled in along the way, held together by the same spiral but never required to tell their stories in a straight line.
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