DIIV talk going corporate, rejecting shoegaze, "looking like shit," more

Last month, I thought that I was being ZIRP'd. DIIV had released a couple singles from their new album, ZIRP!, and those songs confused me. Well, not so much the content of the songs, but rather the disparity between how the songs sounded and how DIIV were presenting them. Their press releases and social media posts declared that DIIV – critical darlings of 2010s indie-rock, reluctant godfathers of 2020s shoegaze, serial committers to bits of all kinds – were reformatting. They were now wearing frumpy suits, spearheading a new genre dubbed The New Alternative, and situating their fifth record, produced by Charli XCX's go-to guy A.G. Cook, within that new, unrestrictive, and un-shoegazey paradigm.

I, like many longtime DIIV fans, was confused. And that was the point. In early October, DIIV released another ZIRP! single called "Trillions." In that one, singer Cole Smith bleated through auto-tune about wanting to earn a billion dollars and the ensuing emptiness of that frivolously wealthy lifestyle. In the "Trillions" music video, all four members of DIIV frolic awkwardly throughout a swanky L.A. mansion, trying to look cool and lavish and instead failing miserably. The song is puckish and sweet – my friend affectionately compared it to Owl City's "Fireflies" – but the band look ridiculous trying to sell it. You know they're joking, but a little part of you also wonders, wait...are they?

Since then, I've heard the entirety of ZIRP!, an album that'll be available to the public on October 30th. It's an album that's simultaneously more serious and more satirical than I thought it'd be. It's DIIV's catchiest set of songs yet. It's definitely better than their last album, Frog in Boiling Water, which was a good album – just not as good as this one. This one's darker and more apocalyptic in some ways and brighter and more hopeful in others. It's a pointed attempt at making their band bigger, but it doesn't necessarily sound like an album that was made in close collaboration with a future-facing popstar producer. I think it sounds like shoegaze. DIIV don't.

Before DIIV played an utterly spectacular show in Pittsburgh during their October run opening for Interpol, I stepped onto their tour bus and spoke with all four members – Cole Smith, Colin Caulfield, Ben Newman, and Andrew Bailey – to try and figure out if, and why, and how I was being ZIRP'd.

The conversation that followed touched on many DIIV-related subjects: coining a new genre, distancing themselves from shoegaze, appropriating corporate aesthetics, the blurry lines between sincerity and absurdity, pissing fans off, how A.G. Cook rejected their original album idea (and then made it better), embracing pop archetypes, Smith tragically losing his house in the L.A. wildfires, and how that terrible experience reaffirmed their personal and musical bond so that DIIV could be built back better than ever.

We talked about a whole lot of other things, too. DIIV are good at talking and I had a lot to ask. Read the entire convo – lightly edited for clarity – down below.