DIIV confront social turmoil with more simplicity on ZIRP!

Until now, DIIV's answer has been to push their songs to progressively hazier depths, from 2012’s scrappily constructed Oshin through to the ominously crushing Frog in Boiling Water in 2024. The heaviness is arresting, sure, but the prolonged submersion left their music feeling a little inert, despite the exquisite sound design.

The pioneers of shoegaze inescapably endure in the background, inviting comparison even as a band attempts to push beyond discharging a dense mass of sound from their guitars. This genre, so synonymous with density, has but one answer to impel innovation: less is more. How, then, do you make this wizardry more spellbinding? Move into the pop world, of course. Cut the suffocating dynamics to get more breathing room.

DIIV – who are currently Zachary Cole Smith, Andrew Bailey, Colin Caulfield, and Ben Newman – have always tied their ambitious guitar voyages to a mast of great songwriting. Their unanimous pinnacle so far, 2019’s Deceiver, saw Smith thoroughly weaving his vulnerable reflections into everyone’s pensive instrumentation, a stylistic choice catalysed by the band’s own turmoil. Frog in Boiling Water, meanwhile, aimed at the existential dread that comes with this decade's global politics.

New album ZIRP!, a thematic continuation if not a stylistic one, is more on-the-nose. The enemies are more formidable, the goalposts have shifted, but DIIV interrogate these larger stakes with less seriousness.

The partnership with A.G. Cook is still not wholly convincing. Lead single “The Fountain” rockets with tension in classic DIIV style, but the noise-pop approach to guitar distortion – clipped and not going all the way – neuters that thrill. “Dare Me” has Cook’s quirky, digital inflections pasted over the driving backdrop, but Smith’s voice feels merely plastered on top. Some of DIIV’s explorative quality is lost, and it’s not the only occurrence. “The Crash” may be the worst offender, and its words on economic collapse and disparaging billionaires are unusually surface-level given the astuteness they generally carry.

Cook’s production led the band to label their new approach to shoegaze as “The New Alternative” – an alternative to alternative music – which in itself has infiltrated the mainstream. But it’s not a denotation that’s all that grandiose. A quick dip into the contemporary nu-gaze scene reveals DIIV’s leaner take isn’t too different from everyone else's.

Nevertheless, the minimalism does sometimes work in their favour. “Kid” is a stellar synthesis of Cook’s intricate, glossy architecture with DIIV’s dream-pop, where ones and zeroes meet organic tissue to form a multifaceted anthem, while “When the Glow Came for Us” almost works as an extension of that, with more commentary pushed to the front. To some, “Trillions” will be the thorniest of the new songs to swallow because it’s so unlike the DIIV we've come to know. Tippy-tappy, indie-pop percussion, Smith's voice drenched in cutesy autotune; the bitpop-meets-rock of it all is closer to beabadoobee – an impossible likeness prior to ZIRP!

Still, listening to “Trillions”, ZIRP!'s unlikely exclamation point makes sense. They’ve called the song the album’s “beating heart,” but the danger of overcommitting to a novel blueprint is failing to follow through with the rest. Unfortunately, that’s exactly what plagues the final third of the album, which features glitchy chatter for the sake of it. DIIV’s colossal shoegaze may have made them grow a little leaden, but ZIRP! is an overcorrection. In shrinking down their scale, DIIV end up missing out on what made them, them.