DIIV - Nu-gaze addictions

Formed in Brooklyn in 2011 as a backing band for a solo project by frontman Zachary Cole Smith (born in New York but raised in Connecticut), formerly guitarist in psychedelic outfit Soft Black and drummer in the much better-known Beach Fossils, DIIV quickly established themselves as one of the leading acts of the nu-shoegaze movement that defined the 2010s.

Smith had a batch of songs set aside that he wanted to release under his own name, and he recruited longtime friends Andrew Bailey (guitars), Devin Ruben Perez (bass) and Colby Hewitt (drums, already known from Smith Westerns) to record and perform them live. The quartet initially took the name Dive, a tribute to the famous Nirvana song, later changed to avoid confusion with two other bands of the same name, one active in Belgium and the other in Sweden in the early 90s.

Quickly signed by Captured Tracks, they wasted no time releasing two singles, "Sometime" and "Human", which outlined a sound decisively shaped both by the Cure-style darkwave of the "Disintegration" era and by the shoegaze spirals typical of the following decade. Preceded by the further single "Geist" and the video for "How Long Have You Known", which closely recalls the early electric charges of War On Drugs, on June 26, 2012 the debut album took shape, Oshin, a revivalist blend mixing the early Creation period, certain strands of 70s psychedelia and the crucial late-80s Seattle scene. A hallucinogenic journey built on martial rhythms, ramshackle, narcoleptic guitar jangle, melodic fragments dropped into dreamy expanses, psychedelic turbulence, cascades of keyboards and shifting reverb.

A stroboscopic experience highlighted by a bright, biting post-punk bassline, emphasized in the recurring instrumental passages (there are also two tracks with no vocals at all), crossed with a motorik attitude very much in the vein of TOY, which takes over especially in the weave of "Druun Pt. 2". The vocal lines often come across as hazy, distant and icy, buried under layers of guitars that embody the light and shade of chaotic New York. The brazen swagger of "Air Conditioning" and the explosiveness of "Doused" are counterbalanced by the hypnotic trips that define the exquisite Cure-esque grandeur of "Wait" and "Earthboy", the sensually alluring melodies of "How Long Have You Known" and the post-punk of "Sometime" and "Oshin (Subsume)". Beyond the influences mentioned above, listeners won't miss the nods to Malian desert-psych, to the point that Zachary cited guitarist Baba Salah by name in several interviews given at the time.

Oshin receives very positive reviews right after its release, even landing on many specialist year-end charts. In November 2012 the band plays in support of the Vaccines' UK tour, and the following month takes part in a leg of the Japandroids' American tour. Starting in July 2013, multi-instrumentalist Colin Caulfield joins the group, proving essential in adding further shades of color with guitars and keyboards. From 2017 he also takes on bass duties, following the departure of Devin Ruben Perez.

But it's above all a series of problems caused by excessive drug use that plunges the band into crisis, leading in April 2015 to the departure of Colby Hewitt, permanently replaced by Ben Newman, who had already taken part in recording some tracks on the debut album.

Zachary Cole Smith is no stranger to the turmoil caused by substance abuse: he was in a steady relationship with model and singer Sky Ferreira when the two were arrested in 2013 for heroin possession in Saugerties, near New York, news that was picked up with huge prominence by all the specialist magazines. Despite his addiction issues, Smith finds himself in an extremely prolific phase: he has amassed a stockpile of around 150 new songs, some of which have already been aired live during the dates supporting Oshin. The time is therefore ripe to begin recording the second album: work starts in March 2015 in Brooklyn, and by the end of the year no fewer than four singles will have been released as a preview of the new DIIV record.

Is The Is Are, produced by Smith himself, arrives online and in stores on February 5, 2016, debuting at number 81 on the Billboard chart. The title Is The Is Are is taken from one of the poems in a collection that Smith himself asked a group of visual artists to compose, after inviting them to curate the album's cover and booklet—a double album containing seventeen tracks, a distillation of the singer's recent compositional bulimia, an (un)conscious therapy for his own existential malaise. About an hour of music that refines the traits of the debut, showing greater brightness and clarity. This time the songs range from Sonic Youth-school noise ("Mire" is literally buried under a blanket of feedback) to Cure-style darkwave, in Seventeen Seconds territory ("Yr Not Far"), all the way to the shoegaze revived by more recent acts like Nothing, TOY, Suuns and Girls Names. A decidedly wide-ranging set of expressive modes, over which Smith's imagination on six strings stands out. Melodic flourishes and surges weave into a dreamlike landscape where the drums express themselves with kraut-school solidity (on the title track) and the words are often half-whispered, almost locked within the imaginary boundary of the lips.

If in the first part of the record the songs portray the American musician's personality, with stretched-out yet dynamic rhythms, in the second part the journey darkens under the shadow of leaden, melancholy sounds ("Healthy Moon" and "Loose Ends" lean toward dream-pop) right through to the bittersweet finale sealed by the enveloping "Waste Of Breath". Sky Ferreira contributes voice and sensuality to "Blue Boredom", sung with the typical style of Kim Gordon in mind.

Immersing yourself in Is The Is Are is, for anyone, an all-consuming experience, a work able to completely absorb the listener, one that succeeds in bringing the band major visibility. But right at its peak, the toy breaks: at the start of 2017 the European tour is cancelled, and Zachary announces to the world via Instagram that he must undergo treatment to fight his addictions. Rehab becomes inevitable and, in the meantime, the band is put on hold. Recovery takes a couple of years overall, during which the inevitable relapses also occur. During 2017 alone, Zachary spends a full six months in various facilities trying to free himself from the demons haunting him.

After the long period of detox, toward the end of 2018 DIIV get back on their feet, thanks to a tour supporting Deafheaven, which very likely has a significant influence on the writing process for the new songs, which turn out brawnier than usual. In the summer of 2019 three new singles arrive, and on October 4 the album of rebirth materializes, one in which the frontman lays himself completely bare with "brutal honesty". The record becomes part of the personal rebuilding process Zachary undertakes to climb out of the storm of heroin addiction, to understand where his pain comes from, to discover its causes and the best ways to fight it.

Deceiver is the record of catharsis, of purification, a dark work, a journey into the darkest recesses of a mind altered by the distorting mirror of drugs. Dark and shoegaze are skillfully steered by producer Sonny Diperri (for the first time production is entrusted to an outsider), who had previously worked with My Bloody Valentine, Nine Inch Nails and M83, and who helps steer the sound toward an aesthetic close to the masterpieces of Kevin Shields. The riffs are more powerful than in the past ("Taker") and the feedback has a coarser grain, reinforced by a touch of grunge smear. "Horsehead", in which Zachary recounts his rehab period without filters, opens the record, setting the sound that will characterize the whole work. The less driving tracks settle into more properly shoegaze coordinates, as in the case of the harrowing "Lorelei", but what leaves you stunned is the ability to replicate the exact sounds of MBV, especially on "For The Guilty", a song that recounts the consequences of success.

In some electric flashes the band shows the influence of Deerhunter ("The Spark"), while in its more melancholy moments it recalls Girls In Hawaii and the more introverted Nothing. The six strings are bare and shimmering on "Skin Game" and "Between Tides", which represents the band's most sensual side, right up to the compromise choices of "Like Before We Were Born", with verses steeped in a pale dawn and dazzling guitar bursts perfect for tearing through the dark. Less noisy, "Blankenship" kicks up dust in an atmosphere of scorching motorik electricity, with lyrics recounting the worst mining disaster ever to occur in the United States, underscoring the album's central theme of personal responsibility. The finale is epic, entrusted to "Acheron", a crossing between two worlds tackled while letting out a seductive wail amid walls of swollen, tar-thick guitars that take over in the instrumental coda.

In 2022, the resumption of live activity allows DIIV to appear at many top-tier international festivals. In late June, to celebrate the tenth anniversary of "Oshin", Captured Tracks releases a boxset containing the band's first three released singles. Sometime/Human/Geist, issued in a limited run of just three thousand copies, offers a journey back to DIIV's very earliest months, when they already had a very clear idea of the musical direction to pursue.

Keep an eye out too for the worthwhile b-sides: "Corvalis" has the typically New York wave-noise sound of early A Place To Bury Strangers, though less abrasive; "Big Joke" reprises the same formula as the main tracks; "Bambi Slaughter" is a cover of a song originally recorded by Kurt Cobain back in his Fecal Matter days, offering yet further confirmation of the grunge pedigree well present in their sound.

The digging through the past continues the following November with the release of a live album, Live At The Murmrr Theatre, a recording of an acoustic set held on August 17, 2017 at the Murmrr Theatre in Brooklyn. The performance was also filmed at the time for a documentary released in early 2018.

The setlist includes some selections from the band's first two albums, plus two significant covers: "Hollow" by Alex G and "When You Sleep", a sumptuous evergreen by My Bloody Valentine that closes the circle by paying tribute to one of the bands that most influenced DIIV's path.

Given such a troubled journey, especially due to the ordeals involving singer Zachary Cole Smith, DIIV's decade-plus longevity arrives as welcome as it is unexpected. Few would have bet on the American quartet's real chances of reaching a fourth album, and yet in May 2024 Frog In Boiling Water arrives. Just to keep things interesting, this time too the work proved anything but easy, not so much because of the pandemic—which was nonetheless no small obstacle—but because of internal disagreements over which aesthetic and stylistic direction to pursue. Disagreements that were resolved not without heated arguments. Losing DIIV would have been a mortal sin, right at the very moment when, on social media—especially TikTok—the shoegaze sound has taken on a comforting role for Generation Z, perennially afflicted by feelings of isolation and loneliness, sentiments well reflected—according to those who follow, analyze and justify the trends—by the dissonances, by that sense of falling into the void, of drowning, well captured through the mood produced by musicians who like to play while "staring at their shoes". The state of mind of those in their late twenties and thirties thus finds a match in the very sound of 1991 (everything changes so that nothing ever changes...), and there's no shortage of emerging bands—among those obsessed with guitars—openly drawing inspiration from shoegazers. But DIIV, in order to make their songwriting contemporary, deliver in the lyrics of Frog In Boiling Water open, highly topical socio-economic messages, tackling the theme of the slow, inexorable collapse of modern society, reduced to rubble by rampant capitalism and the unbridled consumerism that followed from it, compounded by the evident failure of politics' role. We inhabit a world in deep trouble, and the frog immersed in boiling water referenced in the title lets us picture the situation as well as anything could. Zachary recently became a father, and this new family configuration inspires glimmers of hope for the future, glimmers that surface here and there within the folds of the record. The result is an album that shows the band's usual alternation between moderately energetic tracks ("In Amber", right from the opening, displays the full arsenal of distorted guitars at their disposal) and decidedly atmospheric ones ("Everyone Out"), all rendered in a consistently enveloping manner ("Raining On Your Pillow", "Reflected").

Shoegaze and dream-pop remain the guiding lights: DIIV once again manage to make their own the lesson of the masters, Slowdive and My Bloody Valentine above all, pairing the calligraphic perfection of their approach with their usual indie attitude (the title track is paradigmatic in this sense). Just listen to the two songs that move most significantly along these lines: in "Brown Paper Bag" it's not at all hard to spot, toward the end, the clear nod to "I Only Said", the all-time classic from the indispensable "Loveless"; "Soul-net" (but also the closing "Fender On The Freeway") is, on the other hand, clearly an apocryphal Slowdive track. Ten tracks in all, which do justice to a genre more beloved today than it was in the first half of the Nineties. Had it been released back then, Frog In Boiling Water would most likely have been panned by critics; three decades later, it is instead hailed as yet another outstanding effort by a band that has managed to move beyond the pretty-boy hype of its early days (and an endless string of setbacks) to establish itself—thanks to the quality of its songwriting—among the leading bands of an approach to rock that places its unshakeable faith in introversion and the careful management of a vast array of effects.

Ride the wave of great music

Add OndaRock to your favorite sources on Google Discover. Don't miss our reviews, milestones and latest news straight in your feed.

Follow on Google