Thursday, May 6th, 2021 - Jacqui Raven
As a teenager, the Boston-raised and Los Angeles-based Mexican-Italian-American siren Diamante, spent her nights cutting her teeth at local gigs on the LA’s famed Sunset Strip. In 2018 she released her first full length album “Coming In Hot” which spawned two hits singles “Haunted” and sultry single “I’m Sorry”, sung both in English and Spanish. After several successful tour supporting the release, she was surprisingly dropped by her record label in the middle of the tour. Since that moment she has been firing of some the the best music she has written, leading up to her first independent album American Dream due in May. Jacqui Raven with an exclusive interview with Diamante.
Your new album “American Dream” deals a lot about perseverance. Was there something that happened to cause you to deal with the music in this way?
DIAMANTE: It’s actually a pretty crazy story. I was 18 when I first signed with that label. It took probably two, three years from the time I was signed to the time that album actually came out. It was like a super long process. I toured on that album for a year or so. When I was on one of the biggest tours of my life, up until that point, it was me, Breaking Benjamin and Three Days Grace. I’m out here playing amphitheatre shows and all that is going on. I get a call halfway through this tour. Well my a&r calls my manager and says, “You know, they decided they’re not going to do the second album with you.” I was like, Yeah, that’s really funny, what are we really here to talk about?” And my manager goes, “No, I’m being serious that they’re not doing the second album.” And I was like, “Oh, okay, time to plan B,” you know, so, at that time, I already had a lot of songs written just because I actually like writing. More people are not telling me to write you know, if I got people telling me, you got to go right. To sit. But if no one’s telling you to do something, then I’m like, I’m feeling very creative. So I had all these songs in my back pocket. I was shocked. I was confused. But I wasn’t necessarily devastated because I knew that I had already built such an incredible fan base, and I had the songs and no matter what I was going to keep releasing music and playing shows. I was just like, okay, we got to regroup, we got to find a way to put out another album. The last year, I’ve been working with Howard Benson and Neil from Three Days Grace, and we wrote and recorded this entire body of work, and it’s almost here.
Your new track “Ghost Myself” is a very personal song. Explain why.
DIAMANTE: On my first album, when I wrote songs, it came from a place of empowerment. And I wanted people to feel more confident and stronger and just better when they listen to my stuff. I never really wrote from that perspective of when sometimes you don’t feel like that, and that’s okay. I wanted to bring that to light and make accepting the fact that sometimes we hate ourselves, ia also an empowering thing. I think the more we talk about it, the more normal it is. I’ve definitely had days where I’m like, man, I wish I could just speak to anybody. And it sounds ridiculous to say, because we’re all super awesome in our own ways. But I deal with depression, so I never really sang a whole lot about that kind of stuff. “Ghost Myself” was kind of my diary, in a way, just getting released. That’s what’s so fulfilling when I write music. I’m super proud of that song. I love it. We did this really cool, like, Girl fight club music video for it, which I love more. It’s just been awesome.
And yet in just 24 years, Diamante has really begun to sparkle. With iridescent sapphire hair, a show-stopping voice, runway-ready fashion swagger, and an empowering message, the Boston-raised and Los Angeles-based Mexican-Italian-American siren brings a new (and blue) fire to rock and alternative music.
Diamante spent her teenage years cutting her teeth at local gigs on the Sunset Strip to become the powerhouse performer she is today. A disciple of both P!nk and Guns N’ Roses who doesn’t fall into rockstar excess or even sport tattoos, she devoted every waking minute to honing a signature “hard rock sound with a modern alternative edge.” This unique and undeniable approach caught the attention of Better Noise Music who signed her in 2015. She hit the studio with super producer Howard Benson [My Chemical Romance, Halestorm, Kelly Clarkson] to record what would become her full-length debut, Coming In Hot. With the release of her first album, Diamante undeniably stormed the scene in 2018 with a #1 song at rock radio (her collaboration of “Hear Me Now” with Bad Wolves), along with a top 15 song with her own single “Haunted”.
Now three years later, and after extensive touring with bands like Breaking Benjamin, Three Days Grace, Chevelle, and Shinedown… Diamante is in full force shining brighter than ever before. In 2019, Diamante parted ways with Better Noise and soon after teamed up with Howard Benson and Neil Sanderson of Judge & Jury as an independent artist to make her sophomore album, American Dream. Diamante capitalized on her newfound ultimate creative freedom and independence by being her own CEO throughout every facet of the album process. On working with Benson and Sanderson, Diamante praises that they were instrumental in “bringing my stories to life and pushing me to embrace my vulnerabilities”.
Read MORE in the new issue of TOTAL ORDER!
Coming May 11th
