Die Shiny
Callie Crofts grew up in Firth, Idaho, the youngest of five children in a house full of music. Their father, Vince, played bluegrass and western swing with the Wild Coyotes, while older siblings brought their own records and musical interests into the house. They remembered falling asleep to his band rehearsing inside and crickets sounding outside.
Crofts’ mother was diagnosed with breast cancer when they were born and died eight years later. They have said the loss made them a deep-thinking child and weakened the sense of invulnerability children often carry. Music gave some of those thoughts somewhere to go. At twelve, they followed an admired older brother into playing bass. Guitar came a few months later, along with the first song they wrote.
There would be hundreds more. Crofts has described songwriting as a skill built through repetition, including the willingness to finish something imperfect and begin again. Occasionally a complete song arrives in a sitting, an experience they call a “song attack.” The rest may begin as fragments saved on a phone.
The public trail begins well before Die Shiny. Crofts released the acoustic folk album Zen Garden in 2010 while living in Utah Valley, working part time and trying to build an audience. A Beatles cover reached far beyond that early audience and helped open opportunities to travel for music from Utah to Los Angeles and Singapore. Around the same period, they began working with drummer, engineer and producer Zac Bryant. A production page for Robyn Cage’s Black Friday project credits the pair with production, orchestration and arranging through Nine Moon Audio.
Their work continued through several different bands. My Fair Fiend formed in 2013 with Crofts on vocals and guitar, Bryant on drums and vocals, Austin Cross on guitar and keys and Kyle McCann on bass and NS Stick. The group recorded most of its 2015 album Making Monsters live, apart from Crofts’ guitar, after a Kickstarter helped fund the project. Crofts also formed the Crofts Family Band in 2014, bringing Bryant into a project built around the family’s harmony tradition. On Making Monsters, Crofts wrote most of the songs and received credits for production, album design and photography.
My Fair Fiend played its last show in early 2017. Crofts and Bryant began putting more of their energy into Die Shiny, a project they had created to hold feelings that had not found enough room in their earlier work. “Radio” became the first public Die Shiny release in August 2019. The listener-funded Drugs EP followed in October 2020, just as the pandemic stripped away many of the live opportunities that usually follow a new record.
They kept working from their home studio. That setup gave them time to produce their own records, pull in another musician when a song needed one and develop material that had been waiting since the project’s earliest conversations. They were also playing in MOWTH, with Crofts on bass and Bryant on drums, while Die Shiny developed alongside it.
The six-song Sex EP arrived in January 2024. Crofts had called it the most intimidating part of a larger planned series because it reached into confidence, liberation, gender dysphoria and the shame and rules surrounding a rural conservative religious upbringing. “Healthy Sex Drive” alone went through years of rewriting while they searched for the vocal approach it needed. At the release show in February, Crofts and Bryant heard a full venue sing every song back to them.
That year also brought two visible markers of where the band was going. The video for “Sacrament,” directed by Ryan Margetts, won Best Music Video at FilmQuest in 2024 and the Utah Film Festival in 2025. “The Fountain” became Crofts’ first openly political song. Friends warned that the directness might hurt the band’s prospects, and some listeners were uncomfortable with it. The single was released on October 25.
Die Shiny released Glory in April 2025. Crofts and Bryant self-produced its six songs: “No Place,” “The Fountain,” “Chrysalis,” “Embalmed,” “Bottom Feeders” and “Random Switch.” The writing moves from self-judgment and exaggerated confidence into wealth, mortality, appetite, consciousness and human connection. In December, SLUG Magazine included Glory among its five albums of 2025.
The band’s place in Salt Lake City’s queer community was becoming more visible at the same time. Die Shiny appeared on KRCL’s RadioACTive, headlined the SLC Pride stage and appeared on the cover of QSaltLake. The “Embalmed” video screened through FilmQuest and later received the Utah Queer Film Festival’s virtual Best of Fest audience award. Crofts has spoken about making shows safe for queer, introverted and neurodivergent listeners. A fan offered the phrase “conscious pop,” and the band recognized it as useful alongside the broader description of electropop with a punk ethos.
In the studio, Die Shiny remains the partnership between Crofts and Bryant. Onstage, they are joined by guitarist Matt Wiley, keyboardist and vocalist Caleb Wall and vocalist Carolyn Schmitz.
The 2026 single “Gold Star, Good Citizen” shows how quickly that exchange can happen. Crofts attended a Utah Abortion Fund benefit and wrote the complete song the next day. The band prepared it for a political march, friends contributed the stomps and claps in the recording and Die Shiny performed it within days at a protest on the steps of the Utah State Capitol. Margetts directed the official video, placing Crofts and blindfolded dancers inside individual white picket fences.
Self-production remains shared between Crofts and Bryant, while digital marketing has become another part of the work. The name Die Shiny holds some of the humor behind that effort. Crofts has connected it to ego, the tragedy and comedy of being alive and the absurdity of taking ourselves too seriously.
For Crofts, the most rewarding part happens when someone in the audience feels recognized and held by a performance. The meaning reaches back to Firth, where music helped a child live with emotions that were difficult to place. They now measure success by whether the songs can offer that kind of recognition to another listener, especially a queer young person.
Salt Lake City, Utah
Conscious pop and electropop with a punk ethos
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