DIIV: ZIRP!

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Genre:

Rock

Label:

Fantasy

Release Date:

2026

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.

DIIV’s previous studio outing was thematically preoccupied with encroaching doom, the title itself gesturing to the pig-in-shit sensation of continuing to exist as the world melts down around you. On ZIRP!, Smith is no less prone to doomy visions of apocalypse—a possible by-product of losing his family’s home to the Los Angeles wildfires in 2025, the aftermath of which he’s described as an experience of “swimming in trauma.” The minor-key gloom of “When the Glow Came for Us” conjures imagery of cars on fire and martial law, while the slick and ominous “Evangelizer” envisions Palantir x Pfizer collab medication sitting in a pill organizer.

But, perhaps for the first time in DIIV’s recording career, ZIRP! also contains moments of levity and even—gasp—optimism, tempered as it may be. The headbanging lullaby “My Star” wistfully reflects on parenthood, as Smith reflects on donated strollers and paternal responsibility; on “Trillions”—far and away ZIRP!’s most straightforwardly pop moment, and one of several Cook co-writes—Smith is uncommonly arch and airy while rhapsodizing on the wastefulness of material ambition. “I’ll have a boat and some kind of big ol’ fuckin’ plane,” he intones through heavy vocal processing, before confessing with an air of futility, “For nothing/For who?/For no one to use.”

A deceptively starry-eyed meditation on consumerism’s endless-ladder emptiness, “Trillions” is reminiscent of the tart and self-reflexive New Pop 2.0 explored by EDM refugee Porter Robinson on 2024’s SMILE! :D. It’s one of a few moments on ZIRP! that trigger a sense of deja vu; the fuzzed-out bass reveries of “The Crash” give way to a miles-wide chorus that smacks of Silversun Pickups’ radio-ready alterna-gaze, while the lightly-brushed “Kid” is anchored by a drum pattern that recalls Clairo’s “Bags.” DIIV have never shied away from wearing their influences proudly—we are talking about a group named after a Nirvana B-side—but it’s notable that their first self-proclaimed pop-focused effort is often reminiscent of others’ work. ZIRP! isn’t quite a portrait of a band in the throes of identity crisis, but this slight tilt towards anonymity suggests that DIIV’s concerted efforts toward reinvention are an unintentional testament to the virtues of being yourself.

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