The New York-based band teams up with A. G. Cook, a pioneer of hyperpop, to push its electric swirls toward a new aesthetic of the crash in a discourse that is openly anti-capitalist.
In DIIV’s body of work, glittering colors are decoys. On the cover of Zirp!, neither the fuchsia pink nor the bright red of this decomposing American flag can lead us to the path of salvation. Frog in Boiling Water (2024) and its carmine hue had already shown us this: the New Yorkers are perfectly lucid about the toxicity of capitalism for our societies, and no turning back is possible.
The rich get richer, the poor get poorer, resources run dry… And Zirp! does not sketch a brighter future, with its acronym referring to the “Zero Interest Rate Policy” that allows borrowing money at almost no cost. A bygone era. “I feel the crash is coming,” Zachary Cole Smith cynically croons in The Crash, a track followed by another titled Trillions. The stock-market metaphor is extended.
DIIV Breaks Through the Dam
If DIIV has the gift of moving us as much as it makes us squirm, the surprise is substantial for this fifth album: it is A. G. Cook, one of hyperpop’s pioneers and Charli XCX’s right-hand man, who was sent by the group to produce the record. At a moment when Turnstile dares to mix pop and electro into its hardcore, it is DIIV’s turn to break through the dam. The guitars take on electronic textures (The Fountain, The Crash), the voices are tinted with Auto-Tune (Trillions, Idiot in the Sky), lo-fi colors fill the space here and there (When the Glow Came for Us)… The result is striking.
A collaboration that proved fruitful thanks to DIIV’s undeniable songwriting talent, certainly, but also thanks to A. G. Cook’s dedication. The producer attended a slew of the band’s concerts to better analyze its music and sense the direction in which it should move. “I became a bit obsessed with their live sound, and I insisted on recording the drums live before most of the tracks were finished,” he explains in a press release.
He continues, detailing their working process further: “We spent a lot of time recording complex guitar parts with specific pedals, and as little time as possible on the computer.” All of this with the aim of “demolishing and rebuilding” the demos. A tour de force.
Zirp! (Fantasy Records/Concord/Universal). Release on October 30. Live at the Pitchfork Music Festival Paris (Badaboum), on November 2.
