Wellington four-piece Dillon Jo released ‘Drift’ today, a hazy single about the people you lose touch with and the small hope of getting them back. Ahead of their debut album ‘Guard Dog’, the band spoke exclusively to YouthHub about where the song came from, how they went from acoustic duo to full band, and why ‘Drift’ is the album’s quiet outlier.
Dillon Jo formed at Massey University in early 2025. Betty Smith and Georgie Levien first connected after both appearing on the 2022 reality music show Take The Mic, and they’ve since grown into a four-piece with bassist and producer Kahu Sanson-Burnett and drummer Ruadh Munro.
‘Drift’ deals with nostalgia, regret and lingering hope after losing someone. Was there a specific moment or person behind the song, or did it come together from something more abstract?
Georgie wrote this song around two years ago, in our first year of university, before Dillon Jo was even created. The general theme of the song is moving from Georgie’s small home town to a bigger city, and the song came from reflecting on how easy it is to drift away from close friends once you enter a new chapter in your life. The song progresses from reminiscing about old times with friends you’ve drifted from into a universal experience of losing people in any sense.
You started as an acoustic duo and have grown into a full four-piece. What changed, in the sound and the dynamic, once the other members joined?
Originally, when Georgie and I created Dillon Jo and were just an acoustic duo, I always knew from the very beginning that our music would transition into a heavier sound when we decided to start a full band. During our first practice with Kahu (our bassist/producer) and Ru (our drummer), it felt as if everything just clicked, and the vision I had for Dillon Jo at the start came to life immediately. The songs we wrote acoustically still hold the same meaning, but the energy we bring to them now is totally different and has transitioned into a dream pop, rock and shoegaze experience live.
As a queer, female-fronted group in Aotearoa’s alternative scene, has that identity shaped how you write or perform, or is it something you’d rather let the music speak for?
I believe that in some ways it has shaped how we write and perform, as we have written songs from the experience of being women and being queer. Mostly, though, in the alternative scene there are limited female fronted bands, and we just want to give our all on stage to prove to ourselves, but also to girls who dream of being in a band, that it is possible to do as a woman. We strive for inclusivity and want to do as much as we can to support other women and queer people in the industry.
With a debut album on the way, how does ‘Drift’ fit? Is it a preview of where the record’s headed, or more of an outlier?
Our debut album ‘Guard Dog’ is a culmination of what we’ve been working on for almost two years, and how we’ve progressed as people as well as a band. I believe that ‘Drift’ sits as more of an outlier, as it’s placed right after one of the heavier songs on the record, but it is still an essential song to the album and the story we want to portray to the listener. As ‘Drift’ was one of the first songs we started playing as a band, our sound has definitely progressed into darker and heavier tones, like our last single ‘Vertigo’ and ‘Windmill’, which will be the first track on our album. However, ‘Drift’ is needed to break up those more grungy songs and act as a nostalgic, softer piece to show what ‘Guard Dog’ is all about.
About Dillon Jo
They’ve played Live Nation’s NZ Ones To Watch Showcase 2026, received NZ On Air New Music Single Funding, and supported The Rions, Foley, Coast Arcade, Hemi Hemingway, Wet Denim and Borderline. They’ve played Newtown Festival, CubaDupa and Performance Arcade, and headlined San Fran three times in 2025. ‘Shiver’ reached number one on RadioActive FM’s Top 11 for two weeks, and ‘Good Person’ reached number one on Radio Control 99.4FM. The band have more than 64,000 streams and over 818,000 TikTok likes.
‘Drift’ is out now on all streaming platforms.
Assets courtesy of 818. Credits: Evie Thomson, Tom Grut
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