I Will Be Happy: An Unsanctioned Chat with Dead Diplomat
Bradenton, FL-based electronic duo Dead Diplomat is busy nowadays. Brothers Ethan Hutson and Ashton Hutson are working around the clock to bring amazing music and stories to their fans, and to everyone listening (and reading), it’s like seeing the planets align. October 23, the band dropped its first installment of The Dissonance — an immersive graphic novel experience with a story complementing the band’s upcoming debut LP, Happy Kids (out 12/8 via their new label, Eponymous). Written and created by the band, the series uses written story, images and sound to transport fans into an evolving canonical universe. What could be cooler than that? “I’ve had this story in my head for years,” says Ashton Hutson, drummer and vocalist of Dead Diplomat and Visual Artist/Co-Director of The Dissonance. “It was only recently that I shared it with Ethan and we began searching for a way to share it with our fans.” Additionally, those who follow the band on Instagram witnessed the production of their first music video and even had the chance to become extras. All of this excitement paves the way for Happy Kids — an angsty and eccentric alt-synth-pop record that explores the artists’ journeys with overcoming broken relationships, pride and insincerity and shares a message of hope for all. With all of their trademark charm and goofiness, Dead Diplomat was able to thwart The Regime’s censorship bots and give The Wave an exclusive look into Happy Kids, The Dissonance, and more.
The name Dead Diplomat is definitely very anti-establishment, but you're not calling for anarchy, right?
Ashton: We are very anti-establishment. We’re diplomats advocating for trusting God. Crazy, right? I mean, ‘God’s fake, right? Aren’t Christians hypocrites?’ Yeah, crazy. As for the word ‘dead’, we are trying to convey our view of ourselves. We try not to value our lives more than we value God’s will.
Ethan: Also, alliteration.
You come from a family of performers. Are you the only musicians?
Ashton: Our grandfather, Randy Estelle, was a concert pianist and recording artist. He taught Ethan piano and gave both of us vocal lessons before he passed away in 2021. We were invaluably influenced by him.
Ethan: Also, our dad is a drummer who used to tour with the band Sagoh 24/7 before they became Anberlin. He taught Ash to play.
Speaking of your dad, you're pastors’ kids, and your church has really stood behind your vision. Your dad even appears as Mr. Talkative in a few Regime videos, and your younger brother is the subject of a few tracks on the album. How else has your family and community made Dead Diplomat possible?
Ashton: As a start, they’ve been tremendously supportive. It’s pretty common that our career choice is viewed negatively by parents, so to have parents and grandparents who understand and bolster our vision means a lot. Circle Christian Arts Academy (Bradenton, Fla.) was founded by our grandparents, and that’s where we learned to perform. That’s also where our new studio is located, and they have given us a great price for the space since we were students for 12 years and because our family still owns it.
Where did the decision to start a new band come from?
Ethan: The decision came after the seventeen-thousandth time someone said our name was '“cute” — and most of those times, Ash said it. It’s very difficult to make serious, thought-provoking art when people think of your band as a fun, cute boy band. There was also a creative shift coming as Ash started to write and our bassist, Xander, left the band, so the name change was sort of inevitable.
Looking back at the name of the last track of Feelin’ Peachy’s Transients, then, we all should've seen it coming.
Ashton: It was officially decided after Thanksgiving dinner at our grandparents’ house when I sat down on the couch between Ethan & Xander — who was still in the band then — and tried intentionally voicing my concern in front of our uncle, who I thought would agree with me and persuade the other two. Thankfully, he did.
The album title "Happy Kids" seems a bit sarcastic given the serious subjects you’re singing about.
DD: The album is essentially about our struggles with relationships and pride. We think that a lack of sincerity is largely the cause. There’s a strong contradiction between the name of the album and its content because we feel that it accurately depicts the conflict of our story. The cover art dramatically shows this while introducing the listener to the enemy of this story: us. If you wanna get real meta — and believe me, we do — then the cover and the name of this album both tie into our web series, The Dissonance.
What one word best sums up the album thematically?
DD: Searching.
Some serious topics are processed in the album: spiritual and emotional brokenness, redemption and forgiveness to name a few. Did you intend to write about these subjects going into songwriting, or was it something that just happened?
Ashton: It just happened, but over a long time and without any plan. Most of these songs were first written over a year before we recorded them. As for the lyrics I wrote, they are all the expression of struggles and questions I’ve had since I was little or the expression of the answers I’ve found only in the past year. As for Ethan’s lyrics, some of them were actually written while we were still in the studio in June as an expression of the lessons we were learning right then. We really had to grapple with the fact that we are all, honestly, very proud. This realization caused a lot of spiritual and emotional brokenness to surface, some of which had developed in the previous weeks, and some of which had been there since we were six. It hurt a lot. It’s a hard reality to accept, you know? When all you really want is to be worthy of your life, you are actually the bad guy. There’s a happy ending, though, and we’re closer to it now because of those struggles.
On the surface, your motto “Better off Broken” seems counter-productive. However, it’s really encouraging us to embrace our brokenness, because, in it, we can truly see God's goodness and be healed. What specifically inspired this song?
Ashton: Well, I wrote the first verse in early 2022 when I was overcome with a feeling of schizophrenia. I would really want to act kindly towards others and feel disgusted by how I mistreated them but then mistreat them anyway minutes later. I felt like I was aware of what was happening but not in control. I slowly realized that the root of my issue was my insecurity, which I tried to cover up with pride. The only way to cure my pride was to realize that I actually had nothing to defend or be proud of. Also, God clearly tells us that he can work with a broken person, not someone who still thinks they’re alright. That’s really what we are trying to say: you can’t fix yourself on your own.
“70x7” is a really beautiful, bittersweet moment on the album. The emotion is really palpable. On the surface it's about forgiving an individual, but what's the greater message?
Ethan: Bitterness is a poisonous emotion. If not released, it will rot inside of you and annoyance will become resentment, eventually becoming belligerence. Even though the song is about forgiving someone, it really is about letting go of this long-held anger. The emotion is so potent because the act of forgiveness in the song involves releasing more than just a grievance.
Can you share the story behind any more of your tracks?
Ethan: Sure. I think it’s worth mentioning the meaning and story behind “Wearing Faces” since that will be the track that we are releasing our first music video for in late November. The song is a cry for sincerity. It begs the question, “Why do I have to act like everything is alright all the time?” — not for the sake of just being hopeless or selfish, but for a chance to actually reconcile reality to God, who we believe can actually fix all of this.
Ashton: “Love Me Too” is a hard hitter for me because it is largely my confession of my withholding love from others when they didn’t measure up to my expectations. It was originally inspired by our little brother, Abel, who is one of the best examples of unconditional love we have. I used to think that loving unconditionally made him weak, which is crazy, because I professed Christ during much of that period of my life — and if you know, like, anything about Jesus, it’s that he literally died for unconditional love.
You call yourself a pop band, while your sound is very forward-thinking. Do you follow any guidelines to keep your music both artistic and commercially viable?
Ethan: Our biggest criterion is how catchy the melody is. We actually have a litmus test for it — when we have an idea, if we don’t remember how it goes the day or two after having it, it’s probably not worth our time. We also pay attention to which melodies get stuck in our heads and the ones our friends hum to themselves. Most other aspects of the song can be out there as long as it’s catchy.
You’ve mentioned Twenty-One Pilots, OK Go, Mutemath, Vulfpeck, Coldplay, Tears For Fears, TobyMac and Family Force 5. Any specific albums or songs you revisited while writing?
Ethan: We each were listening to different things while writing. I was absolutely obsessed with “Remember” by Weval.
Ashton: Meanwhile, I was still enjoying the sensation of headbanging to the song “Watermelon” by Tom Rosenthal — you’ve gotta try it. Trench and Blurryface by Twenty-One Pilots were the largely mutual standard for our work, as well as some stuff from Empire of the Sun, MGMT, and Mutemath. I can say that the drop for “Break Your Clouds” was directly inspired by “Never Give Up” by For King & Country.
How long did it take to record the album, and where did that happen?
Ethan: The earliest demo was written about two years ago, and we had written most of the songs individually before we came together and finished. After we graduated from college, we opened our studio in Bradenton (Fla.) and started working out of that space, which was pretty nice. That was the first time we had a dedicated location for our work. There weren’t many outside distractions and we were able to work uninterrupted. We were recording and mixing in the studio almost daily for about a month. We really took our time and went through dozens of variations of songs throughout.
So, you each had individual songs that you wrote on your own. How did you work together to finish everything?
Ethan: We came together with these demos for the last two months or so of production, and that was pretty rocky. We hadn’t done a lot of collaborative writing and had to work on how we compromised and made progress, which took about half the time. We both wrote and produced our own songs for the most part, but every song includes some creative elements from each of us. The only two songs that we created with pretty equal contributions were “Bluff” and “A Grief Observed”.
It sounds like putting the album together was a challenge.
Ashton: We fought a lot. This was the first time that we had to truly prefer the other person, and we were not good at it. Ethan actually punched a chair and broke his hand during the recording period, so there was a lot of humbling during that time. We were also producing the whole thing ourselves, so trying to make it sound like the industry standard was a very difficult endeavor.
Dead Diplomat exists within its own universe: a dystopian civilization called The Regime where "citizenship is the highest virtue" and sad citizens are rehabilitated in Happy Camp. This is definitely a reflection of the superficial world we live in now — but does this story represent something more personal to you?
Ethan: Yeah, we’ve actually begun to tweak that narrative, but that’s the gist of it. The whole story plays into the concept of authenticity and truth and is largely based on the conflict portrayed in the album — which is why we chose a photo taken straight out of that universe for the cover. Beyond all that, the story represents the beginning of something we’ve both wanted to do for years and hope to make a lifelong career out of.
Ashton: We love telling stories probably as much as we love writing music, and we really want to do both. Our dream career is probably one where I’d get to write and direct my own feature-length films, Ethan would write all of the scores, and we’d tour as a band whose concerts are set within the universe of those films. We’re a band, but we want to do so much more than just write music.
Who is the Regime exactly, and what do they stand for?
Ashton: The Regime is kind of a placeholder name for the city that our characters were born and raised in. This city was founded by a group of people formally referred to as the High Regime. Without going into too much detail, these leaders essentially stand for superficial happiness, blind obedience, and self-medication for all, but there’s much more to their nature and origin that will only be revealed as The Dissonance unfolds.
Does Dead Diplomat take place in a post-apocalyptic world? In “A Grief Observed”, you sing:
"The bombs went off and all the world was left in wreckage
No one wins when using these atomic weapons
We couldn’t let them get to have the last transgression"
Ethan: Honestly, we’ve blurred the line a bit. We originally were going to go all in with the world but changed trajectory several times. Now, we are mostly here and a little bit there. We wanna be real people who make fictional characters, not the other way around. That line in particular is more of a metaphor.
Are there bits of storytelling hidden within the lyrics that listeners have to dig for?
Ethan: The story we’re telling with our fictional world is actually based on the album and not the other way around, so you’ll actually find characters and lore in The Dissonance rather than the album. For instance, we actually introduced a key new character called Happy Kid into the series after we had decided on the name of the album. He will show up in the story around the 4th or 5th month.
Before The Dissonance, the story of Dead Diplomat unfolded mostly through social media, where viewers were subjected to propaganda videos that introduced characters and documented Diplomat's escape from the Regime. Clearly, a lot went into writing and filming these. What did that look like?
Ashton: It looked like a lot of long meetings with our uncle, Nate Estelle, who is a great storyteller and creative mind, a lot of filming and editing every day, and a lot of burnout. It wasn’t very sustainable, namely because we lacked the resources needed to produce a coherent storyline that would be posted daily on our social media. We saw pretty decent growth and excitement from our followers, though — so we at least learned that this kind of content was something our fans would really enjoy. Through The Dissonance, text, images and sound are the most promising mediums we’ve found to share this story, and in a much more complete and satisfying format than social media. We’re deeply excited to share it as we really believe it is something that our fans will enjoy even more than the story we shared before.
Speaking of The Dissonance, how do you work together to make it happen?
Ethan: Ash creates the artwork while I create the soundscapes and write the text for the most part, although Ash reviews each episode and makes tweaks. Because of the volume, we have created the first couple of months now and will be continuing production as the series progresses. We plan to release one scene every Monday for now.
What are some of your favorite things about being Dead Diplomat so far?
Ashton: We’ve always loved music and stories — and it’s amazing, being able to create them for a living through Dead Diplomat. We don’t find any kind of work more fulfilling than creating art. I think we’ve become obsessed with it sometimes. Also, we absolutely love playing live shows. When we played our first show, nobody knew us, and yet almost everyone seemed to have a blast when we played. That was what originally made me decide I wanted to become a touring musician.
What do you ultimately hope people take away from Happy Kids, The Dissonance, and Dead Diplomat altogether?
DD: Uhhmm…you’re better off broken, and you are loved, and you can love others because of that. Also, loving isn’t easy, and it has nothing to do with romance, although romance should have everything to do with real love. Jesus is legit. He is alive and well, and that’s the only reason we are still alive. You’re better off broken. Be real.
Pre-Save Happy Kids, out 12/8: Spotify | Apple Music
Read More: The Dissonance
Singles: “Stop Fighting” | “Love Me Too” | “Break Your Clouds”
Follow Dead Diplomat: Website | Instagram | Spotify | Apple Music | Bandcamp | YouTube
