DIIV have released ‘Kid’, the second track from their forthcoming fifth album ‘ZIRP!’, due October 30 via Fantasy Recordings. Following previous single ‘The Fountain’, the new track offers another look at a record that finds the New York band pulling their shoegaze roots towards something brighter, stranger and increasingly immediate.
‘Kid’ arrives with a video directed by Jaxon Whittington, with footage filmed by frontman Zachary Cole Smith’s son Roy and his friend Julian. It is a suitably personal visual accompaniment to a song that catches DIIV in the middle of another shift, retaining the guitars and distortion that have long defined them while making considerably more room for melody.
That tension sits at the heart of ‘ZIRP!’. DIIV have spent much of their career occupying the spaces between shoegaze, alternative rock, grunge and pop, moving from the dreamier edges of their early records towards the heavier ‘Deceiver’ in 2019 and the dense, uneasy atmosphere of 2024’s ‘Frog In Boiling Water’.
For album number five, they have brought in A. G. Cook, the producer whose work with Charli XCX and Caroline Polachek has made him one of contemporary pop’s most adventurous figures. On paper, pairing Cook with DIIV could suggest a sharp turn towards electronics. Instead, the collaboration appears to have pushed Zachary Cole Smith, Andrew Bailey, Colin Caulfield and Ben Newman deeper into the physical sound of the band.
Cook spent time watching DIIV live before recording began, placing particular emphasis on capturing live drums and carefully constructed guitar parts rather than rebuilding the band through a computer. The result is a record that aims to preserve the weight of DIIV while bringing their melodies further forward.
The band are calling the territory they occupy on ‘ZIRP!’ The New Alternative, a deliberately broad term for music that refuses to worry too much about where one genre finishes and another begins. It suits DIIV, whose music has rarely behaved neatly enough to stay inside the shoegaze tag routinely attached to them.
There is also a typically bleak joke buried in the album’s title. ‘ZIRP!’ takes its name from zero interest rate policy, using the financial term as a doorway into a record concerned with technology, failed start-ups, streaming culture, surveillance and the increasingly peculiar experience of existing as a user inside an algorithm-driven world.
Yet the music itself appears to be moving in the opposite direction. Where ‘Frog In Boiling Water’ often felt claustrophobic, ‘ZIRP!’ is being positioned as a more open and melodic record. ‘The Fountain’ combines DIIV’s familiar guitar density with a more direct rhythmic drive, while ‘Kid’ continues the move towards hooks that arrive without sacrificing the band’s underlying abrasion.
It is an interesting turn for a band now approaching 15 years into its recorded life. Rather than sanding away the qualities that made DIIV distinctive, ‘ZIRP!’ appears to be testing how far those qualities can stretch. The guitars are still there, the noise remains and the unease has hardly disappeared, but this time the melodies are fighting their way much closer to the surface.
DIIV will appear at Balaclava Fest in Brazil on September 27 before joining Interpol for selected North American dates in October. They will also perform with Basement at Los Angeles’ Shrine Expo Hall on October 20, ten days before ‘ZIRP!’ arrives.
