Recently announced for the Laneway Festival 2027 lineup, New York-based modern shoegaze band DIIV have teamed up with British producer A.G. Cook on their epic 'new alternative' album, ZIRP! The record builds on the themes of the band’s 2024 album, which explored the “zero interest rate policies that drew us into a world of failed startups and turned us all into atomised ‘users’”.

When DIIV approached Cook, the producer envisioned “destroying and rebuilding their demos, Screamadelica-style, into a finished product”. Ultimately, the producer instead, became fascinated by the band’s live sound, insisting on recording live drums before most of the songs were even finished. The sessions also involved recording intricate guitar parts using specific pedals, with as little time as possible spent working on a computer.

“After a few rounds of that, ZIRP! emerged as a concept, and a sort of utopian, dystopian mantra,” Cook says. “For me, it became a vehicle to push the band into new territory.”

We spoke to DIIV frontman Zachary Cole Smith from the band’s tour bus in America about exploring this new territory, the making of ZIRP!, and life on the road.

How's the tour going?

Tour's great. We're on tour opening for Interpol, which is a cool fit. It's an interesting pairing because I think you can draw a straight line between them and us, in terms of starting out in New York.

Did you know them previously?

No. Never met them, and I hadn't really spent a lot of time with their music, so it's fun to dig in a little bit.

How is it playing some of the new stuff? How has the reaction been?

The new stuff sounds amazing to me. I feel like we wrote the songs with the live show in mind. They sound great. People have been excited, especially for the songs they haven't heard yet. I think we're playing about five new ones or something like that. So yeah, it's fun. They sound good.

I'm obviously very excited that you worked with AG Cook on this. I've been a fan of what he does for the last decade, and I've especially been digging into his albums over the last year or so. It felt like a perfect fit to me. Why did you work with AG?

That's cool. It's funny that you've been deep-diving for the last year, because that's what I've been doing for the last two years or however long. It's such a rewarding catalogue, and there's so much stuff.

There aren't a ton of records, but the records are really dense and sometimes have so much extra material. Then there's the whole world of PC Music to investigate, and some of his production stuff. His catalogue is really diverse.

I think we were intrigued to work with him partially because it felt like he'd experimented with a lot of these rock music tropes. I feel like "Oh Yeah" is such a soft-rock takedown in a way, but it's such a beautiful and amazing song. Some of the rock stuff on Britpop felt really exciting to us, too.

But it's also just that he's someone who's always in search of reinvention, or a new approach, or something that's exciting and fun to him. That's really where we were at. We wanted to make something with him, and it could've been anything. We weren't like, "All right, let's make our pop record," or something like that.

Yeah, he does have a very pop sensibility, which can be pretty infectious. What do you think he brought to your world, and how did he help shape your sound?

A lot. I think from the beginning, he resisted being the electronic music guy caricature who we're like, "Do your little silly thing on our demos," or something like that. He really wanted to be involved from the ground level and work with the band from scratch, which was really fun.

But he also brought this really thoughtful, conceptual, big-brain mentality to pretty much every decision we made. He always wanted things to be rooted in some kind of conceptual world.

We started making a couple of songs with him, and he was like, "I need some type of conceptual world." So I made the group chat icon these crashing stocks, and then it was like, okay, we've got something. We're starting with something, and it evolved a bit from there.

He was always pushing for the lyrics to be done way before the vocals needed to be recorded because it was so important to him, conceptually, that everything was aligned.

So he's very thoughtful and deliberate, and extremely, intimidatingly brilliant. Which is really fun to interface with because he's got a lot of ideas. He brought that kind of vibe to the table, too: the pursuit of fun, the pursuit of newness, and the pursuit of things that were exciting to us and to him.

How do you think the band has evolved as songwriters and musicians on this album?

On the last record, I feel like I spent a lot of time working through a pretty deliberate decision to make everything this kind of group-think, democratic process. It was a consensus method of working our way through decisions, and we all got very perfectionist-minded. There was a lot of anxiety about our lives and the world and all this stuff baked into it.

I think, honestly, spending time with my kids taught me a lot about just living in the moment. This record is one where we're pursuing the spirit of fun, being in the moment, and just being present in the song, whatever it is. We're trying to ignore the big-picture anxieties and that kind of group-think thing, which carries a lot of insecurities and dynamics and stuff like that.

Is there a song that you're particularly proud of on the album?

Yeah, there are definitely a bunch of them that I feel really proud of. In a kind of weird way, I feel really proud of "Trillions", which is such a weird one. It's a song that we wrote in a very short amount of time with AG.

I feel like we never would have previously had the confidence to do something like that. It was so bold, but it also required a certain nuance in your ability to perceive it.

Even at the beginning of the record-making process, I'd written it off. So I feel really proud that it turned into a really cool song that I'm happy with. When I listen to the record, I'm looking forward to it coming on.

Which other artists are you excited about at the moment? What have you been listening to?

I've been a Jane Remover stan since Frailty, I guess, and especially since Designated. I've really loved watching her evolution and progression, and the way the pop world has shifted in a way that she's such a part of, as such a singular artist. I'm really excited that she's playing Laneway. And, yeah, actually, there's a whole group of musicians on that festival that I've been listening to and am really excited for, but I don't know.

It's a crazy lineup.

It's a crazy lineup. There are some Philly guitar bands that I think are incredible, like TAGABOW and Feeble Little Horse and stuff like that. They feel like they're working to reinvigorate rock music, especially this sort of similar guitar-type paradigm that we're in.

So, I don't know, in terms of new artists, that's stuff that I've really been liking a lot. And then there's this British DJ called DJ Rum, who I've been really obsessed with over his last couple of releases.

What do you hope that people take from your album?

I feel like on the last record, we talked a lot about this idea of having hope in the face of a really shitty and violent world. But we didn't really give people that hope in the music so much. It was more that we had songs about different ways of having hope.

I feel like this record feels like a kind of hopeful and exciting future for us. I see it as an exciting future for myself, and I hope it can be a moment of levity or fun, or help people cope or laugh at the absurdity of the world we've found ourselves in.

It's the most absurd and banal version of societal collapse that I can imagine, so I hope there's just something that people can connect to in that way, where it doesn't feel so serious all the time.

Because I think humour is really essential. Probably the best of all coping mechanisms.

Do you think that having kids helps you have that kind of attitude?

In some ways, it's harder because the stakes are higher. They have to live in the world that we give them.

But also, yeah, having kids keeps you in the moment, and there's so much adventure, play and fun. Everything is some version of play.

I'm always thinking about how you have kids and think, "I'm going to teach them everything I know," but you don't really do that. You actually spend most of the time learning from them and unlearning shit that you know, which is really fun and cool.

Yeah, I can only imagine that's probably the key to good parenting.

I hope so. We'll see. We'll see how they turn out.

I'm excited for you guys, and I will see you at Laneway.

I'll see you at Laneway. We're really excited. Thank you.

Listen to ZIRP! here.

@diiv