Louie Kovatch/Orienteer
Sustaining a living as an indie rock band for 15 years, in this century, in this economy, is no small feat. But DIIV, who have seen their share of inner turmoil and ridden the waves of industry change, have not just survived. The band founded and fronted by Zachary Cole Smith is arguably in its most interesting era to date – restlessly creative and willing to challenge themselves (and us) while wisely keeping one eye on the bottom line. Consider their heavy, monolithic turn on Deceiver (2019); 2024’s hypnotic and deeply socio-political shoegaze of Frog In Boiling Water; and now, a pivot of a different sort: candy-colored art, memorable hooks, bright melodies and wry (and occasionally hopeful) takes on the world abound on the new ZIRP!
That comic-book styled acronym of a title stands for Zero Interest Rate Policies, the post-recession cheap money that led to a handful of obscenely rich tech entrepreneurs but left many others poorer, only widening the Western wealth gap. ZIRP!’s cover art depicts a pink, red and white distorted American flag, the stripes as arrows pointing decidedly downward. DIIV have lost none of the anti-capitalist fervor that fueled Frog, but while that album marinated in soupy polemic, ZIRP! is immediate, kinetic and singalong sweet. When guitarist Colin Caulfield holds a mock Rolling Stone with the headline “DIIV Goes Pop!” in the video for the irresistible “Trillions,” they’re only half kidding. An August announcement of the new LP trumpeted DIIV as avatars of “The New Alternative” – wait for it – “a new genre for music’s optimized VC-funded super deluxe remixed AI-enhanced algorithmically perfected wild west 2020s, where a million streams is great, a billion even better and a trillion well within reach.”
So while Smith, Caulfield, Andrew Bailey and Ben Newman are leaning into pop sounds, this is still a wickedly smart, reflexively ironic band who delivers the medicine with a spoonful of sugar.
On “Trillions,” Smith, with Auto-Tuned breeze, rattles off a wish list of material dreams that any fan of rich-get-richer capitalism might desire: gold floors, a boat, “some kind of big ol fucking plane,” adding crucially the zero-sum rot of “and I win and you lose.”
“The Crash,” a power pop rave-up, gleefully calls for billionaires to be thrown in an alligator pit. There’s hope, too, for a societal reset in “Dare Me” and in a redemptive closer, “Idiot In the Sky.” If there is anything underpinning ZIRP!, it’s the notion of rebirth and a rebuild – of the band and, in a very literal sense, for the singer.
Cole Smith is no stranger to hurdles. I spoke to him at length for Billboard in 2017 about his struggles with addiction and the long road to sobriety. But nothing compares to January 2025, when Cole, his wife Dani and their young son Roy lost their home and most of their belongings in the devastating Eaton Fire that tore through Altadena, north of Los Angeles.
That horror informs at least two of the songs on ZIRP!: “Us Against You” and “When The Glow Came For Us,” whose lyric recalls digging through embers for salvageable belongings. Only months after the fire, Cole and Dani welcomed a second child. That emotional roller coaster makes what he and DIIV have accomplished – turning around a new album in record time for the band – all the more remarkable. Through donated and borrowed gear and in a rented Chinatown painting studio, they started anew, jamming and writing. One day at a time, with new urgency and purpose, DIIV reconnected with some of what made them such an electric and engaging outfit all those years ago.
Billboard spoke to Cole Smith a week before the release of his latest ode to rebirth, ZIRP!
You’ve been playing about half the album on these recent shows. “Kid” “The Fountain” and “Trillions” are out there, but are the others going over well, even before release?
They really are. Part of the goal of the record was to make songs that were fun to play live. Frog was such a slow and claustrophobic record, and I love that record, but it made the live shows a bit more brooding. And so we wanted to reintroduce the more fun, up-tempo, fast, cathartic element of previous records. So we played “My Star” and “The Crash” and people were going crazy.
It’s been two and a half years since Frog and if I am not mistaken, that’s the quickest turnaround in between records that DIIV have ever had. Which is made all the more remarkable considering what you and your family went through for the past year and a half.
In terms of the timeline, DIIV has always had this trajectory of… it’s always felt that if we want to take the band more seriously, then striking while the iron is hot is important. But also we wanted to throw away some of the preciousness and perfectionist tendencies as had on Frog, and so working quickly really helped us do that. But it is all related to the fire in the sense that DIIV has always been a band that had to work through adversity a bit. And so having this hard reset, personally, was something that allowed me and made it easier to pivot, ’cause it was like, “OK, there’s new gear, there’s a new sensibility around – what is the band? What are we doing?” And having that reset was this moment where I really took stock of what role the band serves in my life and what I enjoy about it, and about music. And having this sense of fun and play was so essential – it’s why everybody gets involved in music in the first place.
And a new baby arrived in the midst of it all.
Yeah, with the baby, Sid, being born around that time too – all that stuff, from the moment the house burned down we were really living in the kids’ world. “We just have to keep everything on the level for you guys.” It was this momentary thing of, “Right now we’re doing this, right now we’re doing this.” And that’s the way that they operate. It’s like, “What’s happening right now? Let’s play, right now!” So being in the moment like that and not having to fixate on the zoomed-out world that Frog did or the real tragedy that we were actively experiencing, and just trying to get through the moment that was in front of us, as it was, was a cool approach to making music. ‘Cause it allowed us to play with stuff and embrace the moment and just serve the song, in a room as a group of people with smiles on our faces.
The album bio talked about you guys as part of “The New Alternative” and with so many things DIIV that felt tongue-in-cheek, but also sincere in a way, about wanting to embrace a more pop side. The word “mainstream” came up a lot, like, “They’re ready for the mainstream!” How seriously or performance art should we consider ZIRP!?
It’s definitely both at the same time. That the line between earnestness and irony is a really fun one to walk. A really fun thing to blur. Obviously [producer] A.G. [Cook] is the master of that, for sure, and it was part of what attracted us to him. The bio was an exercise in playing with that marketing and going over the top. There’s irony, for sure, but it’s just as earnest too. “Trillions” is a good example of that: the song is pretty tongue-in-cheek, but it’s also completely earnest in a sense, in that we want to be able to make a living from our work. For us, “trillions” is just a living wage. That’s our trillions, and we want that.
“Trillions,” is special. I love how it’s prefaced by “some kind of” – because it sounds like just some kid dreaming…
Yeah, you don’t know what you want, you just want it all! And it’s the idea that no amount of success is ever enough. But the video and the whole treatment and this absurdity and satire – it’s also real. And it’s part of the mythology of capitalism in American culture that is so in the DNA of the record itself.
You guys are too smart and tapped into the world to ever embrace safe and anodyne pop, and I think truly mainstream pop plays much safer than you do. So it was interesting to me to see “pop” and “mainstream” repeated in that bio.
The pop artists that we’re really interested in, whether it’s Charli xcx, who was making her record at the same time with A.G., or a band like MUNA being so pop in a way but also so politically outspoken or the idea of “The New Alternative” was to take stock of – I mean, you saw it happen – the ‘90s co-opting of “alternative” in this very corporate way. It never really recovered from that, and the alternative charts feel like such a corporate space. In thinking through all the different implications of the word “alternative,” you know the Margaret Thatcher saying, “There’s no alternative to capitalism”? Thinking of alternative in that sense, as an anticapitalist, anti-corporate word, it was fun to apply that to alternative music, and be like, “We need an alternative to ‘alternative.’”
So what was it that drew you to A.G. Cook in the first place? I was thinking of his Britpop triple album and the faux websites he created with it, like “Witchfork.” That seemed very DIIV.
I’ve been a fan of A.G.’s for long time, since the old days in New York. There was this parallel scene happening in London that seemed to be so brash and forward-thinking and smart. It always appealed to me. There was this record he made with Finn Keane [as the duo] Thy Slaughter. It’s this really bizarre futuristic and cool rock record, with crazy guitar solos that are actually a vocal that’s through a distortion pedal – the production is insane, the songs are insane. Really cool project. That was part of it. And then the big one for me was Britpop, especially disc two of Britpop. The song “Bewitched” was one where I was like, “This is such a futuristic rock sound.” It’s so clean and complex with so many sounds and so much movement. So that was a huge part of it. And definitely, our “Soul-net” website [a dystopian parody promo for Frog In Boiling Water] and his “Witchfork” existing at the same time, it was pretty clear that we were kindred spirits musically and culturally. I could tell that we would have fun in the studio, and be able to understand that drive to seek a new sound, constantly.
And did you? He seems like a guy with very strong ideas, and I know creative democracy is really important to you guys. With Frog there were some disagreements you had to work through.
This time was really not marked by disagreement, because of partially the pace of making everything and being in the moment, having fun. It was just more freewheeling. And then A.G. was just this trusted collaborator, who would be like, “This song needs a guitar part, here’s a guitar.” And we’d just make something up on the spot, in front of him. And pushing us in a way that we really wanted to be pushed. We had originally approached him with this very destructive process, where we were like, “Take these songs, and fucking rip ’em apart!” And then he was like, “No, let’s make it together.”
Even before the fire, had you guys already talked about, “We want to make a pivot with this next record.” Did you already have some things written at that point?
We had maybe one demo? “My Star” [a rocker, for Cole’s son Roy] was the first song that we wrote – I got the band together in my garage in Altadena, and we just had fun making music, really for the first time since Frog. We were like, “This is great! Let’s do this every single day! Let’s meet up tomorrow.” And that day that they came over was the day of the fire. So, a couple hours later, it was all gone. And so then it was this new perspective.
“The Crash” is the first place on the record where the real politics kicks in – “billionaires screaming in an alligator pit” and “everybody loses when the shareholders win” – but again it’s delivered in this fun, power pop way.
That song came from, I had been listening to – and still am, a lot – The Prodigy. And they do this synthesis, the drum and bass or electronic worlds meeting the rock world and hip-hop, all so cohesively. That was part of the exercise early on, incorporating more elements into our sound. I feel like with that song, or the songs from the Frog era or even before that, some of these things would be really radical ideas. But these are now popular ideas. I think that there is a strong anti-billionaire, populist sentiment. These ideas are held by way more people now.
You see the recent protests in France, anti-ICE protests here and it feels maybe like an inflection point, yet I wonder sometimes if we get carried away with thinking that and then things settle back into the status quo.
Yeah, I mean there definitely is a spirit of violent revolution on this record. “Us Against You,” “The Crash,” “Evangelizer” – that’s a huge part of the record. But also, really wanting to address hope and the spirit of rebuilding in the aftermath of that. And so there is a lot of hope and positivity there. But I do feel like that [revolution] is a pretty popular sentiment at this point.
For sure. You close the record with “Idiot In the Sky” which is a beautiful song and also feels to me like a prayer, in a sense, for another world, a restart. We could call it revolution. Maybe a rebirth.
That is the hope on the record, for sure. But I also think the record itself represents hope for us, too. The hope of having fun, and just being able to make music together. I feel like it’s baked into the music too, this sense of, like you said, rebirth.
Turnstile played a concert for Palestine, Sudan and Lebanon at the Washington Monument. And I’m sure you followed the whole Macklemore saga.
Mm-hmm.
And yet for every artist like those guys I feel like there are 50 who don’t or won’t — and maybe have legitimate security concerns — about speaking out. Do you think it’s a chilling time for people to use their platforms to speak out?
First of all, it’s really brave that there are artists willing to put their money where their mouth is and really take risks. For me, the most exciting moments in music are when artists take risks. And having the courage to really put your personal livelihood at risk, to speak about what is important to you or injustice, is really necessary. And I have so much respect for artists who do that, and no respect for artists who don’t. It just feels like…cowardice to shy away from that. Maybe there’s artists who just believe in nothing. Or are so privileged or sheltered that they haven’t given two thoughts to the world outside their front door. But for artists who do have beliefs and refuse to voice them and stand up to the corporate overlords, or whatever it may be, that’s cowardice only. And it makes me sad. But respect to people like Macklemore and MUNA and Fontaines – tons of artists – who have really put their money where their mouth is.
As ZIRP! is about to drop, compared to other DIIV records, what feels most different about this time?
Tons of things are different, but it does feel like there is a real palpable excitement around our music, which we definitely felt on the first album [2012’s Oshin] because it was this new, buzzy thing, and there was all this hype and excitement. In a sense, we’ve been chasing that feeling for 15 years. And, obviously it’s different, but it does feel like for the first time since then there is this excitement and it feels really good. When we’re this far into our career, and have put all our eggs in this basket, and we walk offstage and the security guard is like, “You guys were f–king awesome!” That feels so good, to feel like we’ve made and are continuing to make the right decision, to just push ourselves and stubbornly refuse to either tune out or just rest on our laurels. To continue to have that mindset that we had in the beginning of trying to chase what is exciting to us. And finding that it excites other people is amazing.
