DIIV

DIIV return to Australia with their brilliant new album ZIRP!, to answer the simple questions that so many bands can’t: What would it mean to grow up? and glow up, too? For as long as they’ve been making music, DIIV have been victims of a world without the vocabulary to describe their willingness to braid the harshness of genres like shoegaze (on 2024’s Frog In Boiling Water) and grunge (2019’s Deceiver) with mellifluous and memorable pop melody. Over the years, the world has caught up with them, with artists like Slayyyter, Eartheater and Turnstile forcing old-guard gatekeepers to find new ways to describe this gleeful disregard for old-fashioned scene designations and genre tags. with ZIRP! – and their embrace of the new alternative – DIIV lock in on a name for the universe they’ve been chasing for all these years, and a sound that represents the apotheosis of that universe. As DIIV’s Cole Smith told the BBC, the new music "feels like a bridge between past DIIV and future DIIV". Produced by british pop wizard A. G. Cook (Caroline Polachek, Charli XCX) – a chief architect of our current post-category future – ZIRP! (named for the zero interest rate policies that drew us into a world of failed startups and turned us all into atomised “users”) expands on the themes of Frog In Boiling Water with a newfound lightness. Here, Palantir, societal breakdown and streaming’s endless hamster wheel are all fodder for rich, sparkling pop songs. DIIV is zeroing in on its punchiest, most memorable melodies to date, each new internal hook and tossed-off earworm indicative of a band more than ready to make good on its ability to play in the mainstream. ZIRP! captures, perfectly, DIIV as they are in this moment: The band you always knew becoming the alternative pop stars they always could be.