DIIV released a new album, “ZIRP!”, today via Fantasy. DIIV’s fifth studio album earlier this week they shared its fourth single, “Dare Me,” They also announced some 2027 tour dates.
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 and grunge 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.
DIIV had previously announced the album to fans via a hotline number. Then they officially announced the album and shared its first single, “The Fountain,” the band shared its second single, “Kid,” via a music video.
British producer A. G. Cook (Caroline Polachek, Charli XCX) produced “ZIRP!” and says in a press release: “It was in the spirit of destroying and rebuilding their demos, Screamadelica-style, into a finished product, but that hybrid, half-remix approach felt completely wrong to me.”
The producer says, “it was in the spirit of destroying & rebuilding their demos, Screamadelica-style, into a finished product, but that hybrid, half-remix approach felt completely wrong to me.” Instead, he became a professor of DIIV studies, attending the band’s shows and forming a unified theory of where the band needed to go next. “I became a bit obsessed with their live sound, and insisted on recording live drums before most of the songs were even finished. We spent a lot of time recording intricate guitar parts with specific guitar pedals, and as little time as possible doing anything on a computer, at least by my standards,” he says. “After a few rounds of that, ZIRP! emerged as a concept, and a sort of utopian, dystopian mantra. For me it became a vehicle to push the band into new territory.”
Cook adds: “I became a bit obsessed with their live sound, and insisted on recording live drums before most of the songs were even finished. We spent a lot of time recording intricate guitar parts with specific guitar pedals, and as little time as possible doing anything on a computer, at least by my standards. After a few rounds of that, “ZIRP!” emerged as a concept, and a sort of utopian, dystopian mantra. For me it became a vehicle to push the band into new territory.”
“ZIRP!” is the follow-up to 2024’s “Frog in Boiling Water”. It was one of our best Albums of 2024
In 2025 DIIV shared a new song, “Return of Youth,” via a music video filmed in the remains of frontman Zachary Cole Smith’s house, which burned down in January that year during the Los Angeles fires.
DIIV is Andrew Bailey, Colin Caulfield, Ben Newman, and Zachary Cole Smith. “Frog in Boiling Water” was the follow-up to “Deceiver”, which came out in 2019 via Captured Tracks.
