DIIV – ZIRP! – Album Review
by Killian Laher

DIIV are back with their fifth album, only two years on from Frog In Boiling Water.  Move past the odd-sounding album title, the opening track The Fountain is an excellent gauzy, distorted guitar track.  Kid is a pleasant-sounding track, less noisy and more poppy with a catchy melody until they throw in a gorgeously noisy guitar break midway through.

Some odd scratching introduces When The Glow Came For Us, which is a swirling dreampop track.  The guitars are very much front and centre here; a warped riff runs through Dare Me, and a fuzzy riff drives The Crash along excellently.

The band have claimed this is their pop album, but it’s not most people’s idea of ‘pop’.  The one track that is poppy, Trillions, jars a bit with auto-tuned vocals.  Evangelizer does a much better job of getting that pop feel, while Us Against You has a melody reminiscent of early 90s Depeche Mode.  There’s fiery guitar work through My Star before a fine finish with the zonked out Idiot In The Sky.

It’s excellent dreampop/shoegaze music, but you can’t help feeling that they could turn out a bunch of these songs in their sleep. But it will make anyone who enjoyed their other albums very happy.

The Fountain