The most surprising element of DIIV’s fifth album is that they waited this long to make something like it. From the mid-2010s on, the pop-crossover gesture has become an exceedingly common trend in all flavors of indie. But up to this point, DIIV have endured—thrived, even—because of their refusal to capitulate to the industry winds that swirled around them. 2016’s expansive Is the Is Are was an impressive and literal doubling-down on the luscious licks and perfumed smog that coated their 2012 debut Oshin, while its 2019 follow-up, Deceiver, thickened the broth with pure shoegaze squall, several years before it was au courant to do so.
By the time the quartet re-emerged in 2024 with the grungy, gorgeously terrifying Frog in Boiling Water, DIIV had become accidental quasi-elder statesmen of nü-gaze’s digitally native confines without a single forced tweak to their own guiding principles. Logic would follow that ZIRP!, the exact sort of pop-crossover gesture that DIIV have resisted across the last 15 years, catches the band at a point of sonic precipice. Following indie-guy Chris Coady’s production on Frog, this time the band brought in A. G. Cook, whose coruscating and deconstructed rock gestures defined Charli xcx’s Music, Film, Fashion earlier this year.
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Despite the new blood and a few stylistic detours, ZIRP! is still fairly in line with the sonic cues that DIIV have become known for. Their shoegaze-indebted sound is bedecked with a few fancy and not-unwelcome spangles—the opening moments of the record’s searing table-setter “The Fountain” are festooned with processed static and firework-synth curlicues—but Zachary Cole Smith and Andrew Bailey still gravitate toward chewy cushions of melodic guitar noise throughout its 11 sparkling tracks. “Dare Me” is full of dive-bombing riffs accentuated by gleaming glitchwork, while the serpentine “Underground” adds a light candy shell to the twice-dipped molasses that so thoroughly coated Frog.
