For a band to have one period of creative brilliance is remarkable enough. But for the same band to overhaul their sound, and a decade later have the next generation of rock titans – Fontaines D.C, TURNSTILE et al – cosigning them, is kind of crazy. But that’s DIIV, I guess.
Following up 2024’s excellent ‘Frog In Boiling Water’ with details of a fifth record, ‘Zirp!’ – due for release on 30th October – first-glimpse new single ‘The Fountain’ shows that what might have been previously called ‘Glow Up’ is quickly becoming a full-on ‘Slay Era’.
Forged from an unlikely collaboration with Charli XCX’s producer extraordinaire of choice in A.G Cook, ‘The Fountain’ shifts their heavy shoegaze blueprint into a stranger, more uncanny type of science-fiction horrorverse. My Bloody Valentine is still the foundational text, of course, but more so than much of DIIV’s output post-2016, ‘The Fountain’ swaggers with a certain glitter and sheen. Check out those lead guitar… ‘zirps!, let’s call them, that cut through the track like a jetplane, and which have hardly struck this fiercely through the psychedelic firmament since Tame Impala’s ‘Innerspeaker’.
Still making rock music that sets itself against the backdrop of an increasingly fucked modern world (which somehow seems more fucked than when they were singing about it two years ago), there’s a bright pop-art colour to the latest chapter of DIIV that makes it seem all the more absurd, but no less real.
Photo by Louie Kovatch
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