Pochette de ZIRP!, DIIV / Fantasy Recordings
New York band DIIV have released “Dare Me,” the fourth and final preview of their fifth studio album, ZIRP!, due out this Friday, October 30 on Fantasy Recordings. The track arrives with a music video, and the band used the moment to announce a world tour running through all of 2027.
A fifth album produced by A.G. Cook
ZIRP! marks a turning point for the band led by Zachary Cole Smith: the record was produced by A.G. Cook, the pop architect behind recent work from Charli XCX and Caroline Polachek. According to several outlets, the album’s title is a nod to “zero interest rate policy,” a wink at the era that shaped the indie scene DIIV came out of. The record runs eleven tracks — The Fountain, Kid, When The Glow Came For Us, Dare Me, The Crash, Trillions, Us Against You, Evangelizer, Underground, My Star and Idiot In The Sky — and follows 2024’s Frog In Boiling Water, itself praised for a return to more direct songwriting after a turbulent decade for the band.
Teaming up with A.G. Cook might look surprising for a band long filed under shoegaze, a genre built on saturated guitar walls and reverb-drenched vocals. But DIIV have always had a taste for reinvention: they broke through in the early 2010s with Oshin, a cult record of the New York indie scene, before going through a period marked by addiction and recovery for their frontman, chronicled head-on on Deceiver. Cook’s presence behind the boards on ZIRP! fits that pattern of constant reinvention rather than a simple play for buzz.
The promotional rollout for ZIRP! kicked off back in August with “The Fountain,” followed in September by “Kid,” whose video was shot by the singer’s own son, Roy, and his friend Julian, under director Jaxon Whittington — a choice that puts the camera on the side of childhood rather than the more expected professional film shoot. “Dare Me” had already been played live for the first time back in September, at Balaclava Fest in São Paulo, where the band debuted six songs from the forthcoming album and covered Charli XCX’s “Playboy Bunny.”
A world tour that stops in Paris
Tickets for the 2027 tour go on sale this Friday, October 30 at 10am local time via Ticketmaster. The run opens in February with the Laneway festivals in Australia and New Zealand plus two Tokyo dates, before a North American leg between April and May, from Minneapolis to San Diego by way of Chicago, Toronto, New York, Atlanta, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle and Denver. The tour wraps up in Europe between late May and late June, including a date at L’Olympia in Paris and stops at Primavera Sound and Best Kept Secret.
- May 31 — Lille
- June 1 — Paris, L’Olympia
- June 3–5 — Barcelona, Primavera Sound
- June 13 — Hilvarenbeek, Netherlands, Best Kept Secret
- June 17 — Berlin
- June 30 — London, Troxy (closing date of the European leg)
For a band long associated with Brooklyn’s most insular shoegaze corner, the scale of this tour — paired with a collaboration with one of pop’s busiest producers — confirms how far DIIV has travelled beyond its original circle. Fifteen years into their career, the four-piece remains one of the few bands from that early-2010s New York guitar wave still releasing music on a major label, let alone drawing festival-sized crowds across three continents.
The gamble with A.G. Cook is also a reminder of how porous the border between indie guitar music and mainstream pop production has become in the second half of the 2020s. Cook built his reputation on PC Music’s maximalist, hyper-digital sound before moving into the pop mainstream, and his presence on a DIIV record says as much about where guitar bands are looking for new ideas as it does about where pop producers are looking for new credibility. Whether ZIRP! ends up sounding like a hyperpop record in disguise or a shoegaze album with sharper edges will only become clear once it’s out this Friday.
