ZIRP: DIIV hand the whole thing to one producer
DIIV's fifth album arrives with A.G. Cook producing all of it, four singles already spent, and a slogan the songs do not need.
BY JOLT Staff · OCT 30 2026 · 3 min readZIRP is DIIV's fifth album: eleven tracks on Fantasy Recordings, produced end to end by A.G. Cook. The band have spent the run-up calling what they do on it "The New Alternative," a phrase that usually covers for a record with nothing new in it. This one has guitars stacked with effects and four singles picked with care, and the raised voice in the title is earned.
Smith started DIIV in 2011 as a solo recording project, after playing guitar in Soft Black and drums in Beach Fossils. He named it Dive after the Nirvana song, changed the spelling when the Belgian industrial act of the same name surfaced, and said at the time that a name is nothing. Oshin came in 2012, built out of krautrock, C86 and Malian guitar; Smith has named Baba Salah's Borey, found in a library, as the record that changed how he wrote melody. Is the Is Are followed in 2016 after a long and troubled birth. Deceiver arrived in 2019 on Captured Tracks, Frog in Boiling Water in 2024. Caulfield joined in 2013 and took the bass in 2017; the four now are Smith, Andrew Bailey, Caulfield and Ben Newman.
For the fifth, they handed the whole record to one producer, A.G. Cook, which is one way to stop arguing with yourself. It is out on Fantasy Recordings on 30 October 2026, two years after Frog in Boiling Water. Four songs were out before it: The Fountain, Kid, Trillions, and finally Dare Me, which came with a Louie Kovatch video and a first play on BBC 1. Nothing else about the sessions has been announced.
The Fountain opens the album. The effects are already thick when the refrain arrives and lands on the word poison, which is the correct place for this band to start: the point where the pretty thing and the bad thing are the same thing. Kid sits second, Dare Me fourth, Trillions sixth. Three of the four singles live in the first six tracks, and that is the record's first problem, because the front half was spent before anyone had the album.
The back half is where the titles go strange: When The Glow Came For Us at three, The Crash at five, Us Against You at seven, Evangelizer at eight, then a closing run of Underground, My Star, Idiot In The Sky. As a set of names it reads like a band sweating through something and coming out the other side able to laugh at itself, and Idiot In The Sky is a fine thing to hang on the last slot of a record titled with a shout. The sequencing has a shape; the rollout broke it.
It is for the people who stayed through Deceiver and Frog in Boiling Water, who want the guitars forward and the vocals further back than the effects. Anyone still chasing Oshin for its dry, borrowed-from-everywhere lines will take it badly, and a listener who has never liked a wall of guitar will not be converted. Play it loud and in one go, or do not start.
The release is what does not work. Four singles off an eleven-track album is more than a third of the record given away, and "The New Alternative" is a slogan doing work the music was already doing without it. That costs half a point at most, and the cost lands on the campaign.
DIIV have now made five records in fourteen years, and the ambition on this one is audible in the credits as well as in the guitars. Forty-seven dates follow: festivals in Australia and Japan in February, North America in April and May, Europe and the UK through June, ending in London on 30 June. Long before any of that, ZIRP has to stand as eleven tracks and nothing else. It stands.
