It’s hard to talk about DIIV’s “The New Alternative” without bringing up Britpop and Soft Rock. The band had been fans of A.G. Cook’s work since the producer’s PC Music days, but it was his 2024 solo album and its playful reimagining of British pop that made him seem like an ideal collaborator for ZIRP!, an album whose stylistic framing – an alternative to alternative’s corporate era – is as cheekily provocative as those titles. Britpop essentially exploded the “fusion of hard pop & soft rock” that defined Cook and Easyfun’s 2023 album as Thy Slaughter, a cloudy, meticulously textured approach to guitar music they recently helped saturate mainstream pop with Charli XCX’s Music, Fashion, Film. For all its big, at times confusing promo gestures, ZIRP! is an emotionally and politically straightforward record that benefits from Cook’s deconstructive sonic language without being overburdened by it; the band originally proposed Cook pull apart the songs and paste them back together, but he rejected the idea. As the follow-up to 2024’s extremely dense 2024’s Frog in Boiling Water, it allows a lot of the same weighty ideas to shimmer on the surface and cut through DIIV’s jaded, beautiful core.
1. The Fountain
In its gleaming grunge hooks, hushed vocals, and perfectly controlled layers of guitar noise, ‘The Fountain’ is a DIIV song through and through, an encapsulation of the band’s past filtered through the new album’s polished lens. With that in mind, the opening line comes off almost on-the-nose: “In every past reflection is a future always coming true.” And when the past is an endlessly consumable product, DIIV bet on the future’s continuous reimagining to drive their music forward.
2. Kid
DIIV cannily follow a song about an unspecified “they” draining “the fountain of youth” with a sincerely nostalgic ballad about struggling to reconnect with your buried child self. More than a metaphorical fountain, ‘Kid’ pins down the images surrounding repressed trauma (“Clean the sink and watch your mouth”) and leaves space for catharsis in the form of a distorted bridge. Even out its loudest, there’s audible restraint in the production, as if these vestiges of pain could never overpower the urgency of the moment. Still, the tenderness is striking.
3. When the Glow Came for Us
‘When the Glow Came for Us’ reframes the previous song’s nostalgia as a by-product of nascent trauma; Zachary Cole Smith, crooning like Minutes to Midnight-era Chester Bennington, is directly addressing the loss of his family’s home to the 2025 Los Angeles wildfires. The slick, reverbed-out vocals recall an era of alternative music where gloominess was easily commercialised, but the arrangement is more in line with the weary melancholy of Radiohead’s A Moon Shaped Pool, subtle glitches and all.
4. Dare Me
While those glitches trickle through ‘Dare Me’, it’s the classic shoegaze riff that grabs your attention. An in-your-face rock song is well-placed at this point on the record, but the magic is in how densely layered it is, accelerating through whirring feedback and warped keys. It might be the most satisfying fusion of the band’s past and present sensibilities.
5. The Crash
On ‘The Crash’, the synths are less decorative and more aggressive, while the political nature of the band’s increasingly dystopic vision comes to the fore. It sounds like DIIV ripping out their business attire mid-performance, no longer plausibly tongue-in-cheek: “Throw the billionaires screaming in an alligator pit/ ‘Cause everybody loses when the shareholders win.”
6. Trillions
Yet wouldn’t it be easy for anyone to buy up stock in the band after listening to this pretty, sparkling single alone, the most obvious argument for “DIIV GOES POP” (the fictional Rolling Stone headline that appears on the track’s music video)? Yet DIIV aren’t upholding pop stardom so much as ridiculing the rock type: “It’s so not cool, but everyone just kind of pretends that it is because… Aerosmith or whatever,” drummer Ben Newman told Chasing Sundays. The subversion doesn’t just register when you factor in the accompanying visual; it’s in the wave of fuzz eerily juxtaposing Smith’s AutoTuned falsetto, accentuating an infectious hollowness when the words “for nothing” are barely legible.
7. Us Against You
‘Us against You’ continues to steer the album in a kind of hopeful direction, this time favouring sweeping atmospherics and anthemic choruses. It’s an embrace of collective solidarity that’s beautifully fantastical, a vision clearly outside the realm of our reality that nevertheless nudges us to “shake that hopeless feeling while you can.”
8. Evangelizer
DIIV immediately counteract that dose of sincerity with some caustic humour on ‘Evangelizer’, which embodies the titular protagonist as someone who can’t go without “Palantir/Pfizer collab pills.” Cook’s fingerprints are all over the processed guitars, slick yet scuzzy, and when Smith sings about calling in “a favor from the big man, God,” there are enough woozy textures in the air to melt that one word into fever.
9. Underground
Ominous and slithery, ‘Underground’ twists the optimism of ‘Evangelizer’ into escapist territory: “Leave the markets, kill the war/ Leave your world that starves the poor,” Smith sings matter-of-factly. He admits he’s driven himself out of control, but the song’s contagious pulse makes it hard not follow him underground.
10. My Star
Smith again sings about losing his composure, but this time it’s a wave of earnestness that overtakes him: “It hits all at once when you donate a stroller.” Unlike Iceage’s ‘Star’, 2026’s other notable headrush of a love song, ‘My Star’ is about a father’s total devotion, the endless work of making the world’s noisiness disappear; though it still sounds like a storm brewing, DIIV give it the form of a lullaby, previous and burning even as the season gets colder.
11. Idiot in the Sky
It’s no surprise the album ends with a psychedelic closer, one that finds Smith crawling behind his most absurdist lyrical tendencies. “What does it signify?” Smith cheekily sings before indulging in a bizarre stream of consciousness: “Demon-eyed, demagogue/ Antichrist, analog/ Diddy Kong, water song/ A neutron bomb.” It sounds like he’s on a roll, but the beat is so lethargic it threatens to numb him out completely. Without being nightmarish, it’s almost dreadful in its dreaminess. You’d be an idiot to believe “everything will be different this time,” Smith seems to suggest as he whisper-sings that final line into the sky. But what’s the alternative?
