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”.

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.

“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 just trying to salvage things,” he said.

The family were displaced and their “new normal” in 2025 saw them move around temporary accommodation. “We’re in an acceptable, decent place now that we’re going to be in until we rebuild the house,” explained Smith. “Which will be at least another year from now.”

“I definitely didn’t imagine a year ago that my family and I would be climate refugees,” he added.

Despite the threat of fires returning, he saID he and his family were committed to creating a new life in Altadena.

“The community coalesced around the fires, with mutual aid, love and support. That thing was so beautiful. We feel so connected to this place, specifically our lot, street, neighbours and community that, like, there’s really no other option.”

Smith admitted that he finds the overall experience “hard to talk about”, pointing towards the complexity of balancing their grief and the administration of trying to rebuild their lives, while also trying to maintain work and parenting.

“I saw this, like, boomer meme on a local Facebook community group that summed it up,” he recalled. “It said something like ‘The waves of grief always come, but they become more manageable over time. But they’re always there’. It really spoke to me. It does feel like swimming in trauma – it’s a good metaphor. We’ve been swimming in it for a year now.”

Smith’s story is, unfortunately, far from uncommon. Across a series of fierce, simultaneous fires, more than 18,000 homes and structures were destroyed.

Other musicians who lost homes included Foo Fighters’ Chris Shiflett, Mablib and alt-pop star Empress Of. Music archives were destroyed and recording studios incinerated.

The DIIV singer said that he is convinced there has been a dual impact on LA’s music scene.

“When musicians find themselves in another position of financial hardship or insecurity that can really shape what people are able to do, and who is able to make music,” he admitted. “In that sense it probably has had a catastrophic impact on affected musicians.

“But then there’s also this element of community and togetherness, where I think that there have been these connections drawn between musicians and completely different paradigms who, just by having gone through this thing together, are now united in a way.”

It comes as MusiCares recently published an update saying since January 2025 they had distributed $15million (£11.1million) in aid to fire-affected music professionals. The NGO confirmed they had supported 3200 music professionals – from songwriters to road crew – with direct financial assistance.

“Recovery does not happen on a fixed schedule,” said Theresa Wolters, executive director at the organisation, “we continue to hear from people who have been in survival mode for nearly a year.”

Alejandro Cohen is the music director at Los Angeles’ legendary KCRW, a public radio station that champions the city’s sounds. Last year, his team got involved with the response efforts.

“It still feels surreal,” he said. “You can drive through parts of Altadena or Malibu and see the scars, not just on the landscape but in the way the air feels a little heavier. The physical damage might be slowly clearing, but the emotional and creative impact lingers. Many people in our community are still displaced or trying to piece their lives together.”

“For lower-income and freelance musicians, the blow was especially hard,” he continued. “Many were already living gig to gig, and losing not just homes but instruments, archives, and workspaces created a kind of cultural blackout. Some have relocated permanently, and that changes the chemistry of the city, those spontaneous collaborations, those neighborhoods that quietly incubated creativity.”

Of course, rebuilding Los Angeles in the context of a heating planet is an uncertain venture.

A major scientific study concluded climate change was a major factor behind the hot, dry weather that gave rise to the devastating fires.

The burning of fossil fuels such as oil and gas is warming the planet – which is resulting in extreme weather events such as heatwaves and drought becoming more frequent and more intense.

Park Williams, professor of Geography at the University of California, remarked: “Communities can’t build back the same because it will only be a matter of years before these burned areas are vegetated again and a high potential for fast-moving fire returns to these landscapes.”

Alejandro Cohen from KCRW concurred “The next year or two will test what resilience really looks like. Climate events like this aren’t going away, and we’re going to have to adapt not just physically but creatively, rethinking how and where we make and store music, how we protect our archives, how we support one another. There’s a risk that what happened will fade from public memory once the headlines move on, but within the community, it’s impossible to forget.”

DIIV are not the only band who continue to highlight the long-term effects of these kinds of disasters.

Last week (January 7), Dawes held ‘A Concert For Altadena’ where they were joined on stage by The Killers’ Brandon Flowers to perform Bruce Springsteen’s ‘The Promised Land’.  The show, which aimed to raise funds for victims of the fires, also featured performances from Aloe Blacc, Jenny Lewis and Rufus Wainwright.

For more information about how to support fire-affected music professionals visit MusiCares.org.