DIIV

This is The New Alternative: a new genre for the 21st century. More specifically: a new genre for music's optimized VC-funded super deluxe remixed AI-enhanced algorithmically perfected wild west 2020s, where a million streams is great, a billion even better, and a trillion well within reach. On their fifth album ZIRP!, DIIV emphatically and ecstatically embrace the underground pedigree and the pop instinct that have anchored the band like magnetic poles for the better part of their career—smashing them together in pursuit of a sound that pre-empts any notion that Zachary Cole Smith, Andrew Bailey, Colin Caulfield and Ben Newman have ever been playing between worlds. Put more simply, on ZIRP! DIIV 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.

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: Album opener and lead single "The Fountain" pairs the sprawl and squall of DIIV records past with a jolting rhythmic guitar section that has arena-filling potential, while "Evangelizer" taps into the sweet-and-sour mainstream appeal of bands like Linkin Park and System Of A Down. Throughout, the band 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.

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