SEATTLE — It’s hard not to love a good hometown connection. So, when news came that Sub Pop had respectively signed two Seattle-area talents, it was cause for provincial rejoice.
This year, veteran indie rockers Deep Sea Diver and Tacoma experimental punk lord J.R.C.G. landed well-earned deals with Seattle’s big little indie label. J.R.C.G. — the solo venture from Justin R. Cruz Gallego of noise-punk pillars Dreamdecay — unleashed his Sub Pop debut with August’s “Grim Iconic …(Sadistic Mantra)” LP. A month later, Deep Sea Diver and Sub Pop announced their record deal with “Billboard Heart,” the first single from the band’s upcoming 2025 album.
With Sub Pop muscle behind them, the future is looking even brighter for the disparate well-established artists.
The Seattle rock hat trick
For Deep Sea Diver, the Sub Pop team-up is the latest of long-tail successes following their radiant 2020 album “Impossible Weight,” which marked a creative breakout for the Seattle favorites. The record received a ton of support from KEXP (and its listeners) and caught the ear of Pearl Jam’s Jeff Ament, who pitched his bandmates on bringing Deep Sea Diver out on tour.
Led by singer/guitarist and principal songwriter Jessica Dobson, Deep Sea Diver wound up doing two rounds of touring with the Seattle rock juggernauts, the first in fall 2023.
“That felt very much like a unicorn moment,” Dobson said. “It’s not very often you get to tour with one of the biggest bands in the world and open in arenas. We had such an amazing time.”
If Deep Sea Diver sounded half as good on the rest of the dates as they did at Climate Pledge Arena this spring, flashing some new songs from their promising Sub Pop debut, they undoubtedly won some new fans.
Sub Pop had long been a wish-list label for the band, who’d heard musician friends speak of the label’s artist-friendly ways. The two sides had spoken, at least informally, in the past. Sub Pop co-founder Jonathan Poneman would come into Lighthouse Roasters, where Dobson’s partner and DSD drummer Peter Mansen works, and Mansen would pass along their records to the label boss.
As they were getting ready to hit the road with Pearl Jam for the second time this spring, Deep Sea Diver had finished work on their next record (its title yet to be revealed) and started sending it to various record labels. That label shopping can sometimes be a “troublesome process,” said Dobson, who got stuck in the major-label system as a 19-year-old beginning her music career
“Sometimes when you finish a record and you start sending things out, either you hear crickets or people get back and they go, ‘We like this. But we want to change 99 percent of your record,’ ”Dobson said, laughing.
Importantly, Sub Pop’s enthusiasm came without qualifiers.
“There’s nothing better than just hearing, ‘We love what you did and we want to work with you,’ “ Dobson said.
On the surface, the pairing of the Seattle staples, who seem poised to make another leap with their new record, and the hometown label that’s pumped out some of the biggest indie rock records of this century is as no-brainer as it gets. For Deep Sea Diver, having an album out on Sub Pop will complete what could be considered the Seattle hat trick, earning support from the city’s flagship radio station, rock band and, now, record label.
The first offering from that forthcoming album, “Billboard Heart,” is a midtempo soul-searcher partially inspired by ‘80s neo-Western flick “Paris, Texas.”
“I love the journey of the main character of that film,” Dobson said. “There’s a scene in it where they’re standing on top of a billboard in the middle of Los Angeles and he says, ‘I’m not afraid of heights, I’m just afraid of falling.’ For some reason, that line really stuck with me.”
The line and imagery bounced around Dobson’s head and working lyrics for a year or two before finally manifesting on the song born of a frustrating writing session. Shortly before they were slated to begin recording the album, Dobson and Mansen were banging their heads against the wall working on music. It just wasn’t clicking to the point that the couple got into a minor argument and Mansen went upstairs while Dobson kept working in their basement practice space.
Finally, Dobson had a breakthrough when she got into a “strange trance-like state … where I just looped things for hours” and wrote the song in a single creative burst.
“It felt like a transmission. That is a rarity in songwriting, where it’s like the song itself was guiding me instead of the other way around,” Dobson said. “‘Billboard Heart,’ it represents a longing, a freedom, a vastness in emotion and letting the past be the past. … Those are very large themes of the record.”
A DIY original
Freedom — at least artistically speaking — has also been an ever-present force in Gallego’s music, both with Dreamdecay and J.R.C.G. Perhaps more than ever on “Grim Iconic,” where the boundary-pushing artist combines his roots in noise-punk and Latin music he grew up on.
After Dreamdecay achieved an exalted status in Seattle punk circles, Gallego started his J.R.C.G. solo project “to test my own judgment and taste as an artist.” In more democratic bands, if ever there was an element Gallego was unsure of, it was often easy to roll with whatever his trusted collaborators wanted to do. While J.R.C.G.’s first two albums — 2021’s “Ajo Sunshine” and the new “Grim Iconic” — feature collaborations with other musicians, including some of his Dreamdecay mates, it all starts and stops with Gallego.
“I just wanted to make sure that I wasn’t stuck inside of that mindset and I really wanted to push my own decision-making,” Gallego said. “I wanted to create a vision, very insular and also hyper-focused on what I needed to make as an artist.”
Mission accomplished.
Even if it wasn’t always easy, that trust-your-gut self-reliance found Gallego embracing a “unique playfulness around experimentation,” which opened the drummer/vocalist to new possibilities. As he chipped away at what would become “Grim Iconic,” Gallego found himself blending his avant-garde punk tendencies with Latin rhythms that were equally innate for the Mexican American artist who was born in Arizona and later moved to Washington.
