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Interview: DIIV
Updated: 52 minutes ago
Interviewed by Jack Montague
DIIV was born in 2011 in Brooklyn, named after the Nirvana song Dive. When their debut Oshin came out in 2012, it signified the broader shift in New York alternative and DIY music culture. It was carved into life with a pleasing assortment of effects pedals, offset guitars, seemingly endless variations of crafted long-distance melodies, and the result was an evolved art form. A distant relative of the 2000s, this record drifted onto bigger things. DIIV were immersed in the early 2010s warehouse scene, playing venues like 285 Kent and Glasslands Gallery. Time has been a constant friend to DIIV’s indie-rock craft, with each album exhaling a breath of fresh air. And behind the music, a group always aesthetically synonymous with California denim, black Stratocasters, and the long-sleeve under short-sleeve combo. Their new record ZIRP! (named after the zero-interest-rate-policy) changes everything, including the band wardrobe. They are all wearing baggy suits now, the sort you would imagine a Detroit car dealer to wear in the early 90s. Zachary greets me behind brown retro movie-director aviators, relaxes into his spot, lights a cigarette, and talks excitedly about the release. Joined by Colin on the call, the three of us chatted about creative diversions, art from LA to New York, and working with AG Cook.
ZIRP feels like as much of a mindset as an aesthetic. How are you feeling about touring and performing on stage with this new approach?
Colin: It’s hard to know because we haven’t played any shows in the suits yet. We’re rehearsing right now, and Cole and I have both been trying as much as possible to wear some sort of suit during practice, to try and inhabit the mind-space. But it’s surprisingly natural. It feels good to dress up.
Zachary: Yeah. I had an experience today that affirmed the suits. You know, when you have a job and you wear a tie you get home from work and everybody knows where you just were. So I got home today and my kids were like ‘Were you at work?’ and I said ‘Yes, that’s exactly where I was.’ I picked up gas on the way home, and the small talk was like, ‘Comin’ off work?’ And that is where I was. Work. So it’s nice to feel respected and on the same level as the rest of the world.
The discipline of wearing a suit feels very dutiful to your craft.
Z: It’s 101 degrees Fahrenheit right now, that’s how dedicated I am.
ZIRP makes a lot of fun out of capitalism, and I do feel like the sense of global destruction provides a bounty to chew on for the artist. How did you visualise this ZIRP concept coming into your initial songwriting and lyricism for the record?
Z: It’s an interesting way to think of the state of the world as bounty for the artist, and it is fun to subvert what anti-capitalist art did, where it was so aesthetically subsumed by the alternative. So it’s fun to kind of do this corporate role play and flip it back, aesthetically. I think the last record, Frog, was very much in a similar world, but in a much more serious and claustrophobic way. So we’re still kind of inhabiting the same world, but in a new way. Even with the way the ZIRP title has a sort of double meaning. On one hand it’s a very fun, and silly, futuristic sounding word, but it’s an acronym for the zero interest-rate policy, which allowed American venture capitalists to gut long-lasting institutions like the music industry. So conceptually, ZIRP kind of exists in both these realms at the same time. It’s a very fun record to listen to, but it’s still a product of the world.
I imagine being from a place like New York or LA carries a certain attachment to their artistic legacies, but these legacies feel quite far-removed in the current context for artists. Working in these cities do you still find it easy to relate to their sense of history?
Z: I mean, in New York it’s almost comical. You can drive up Bowery and be like ‘Oh, that was CBGB!’ and now it’s a John Barbados store, which feels very ZIRP-coded. Colin, what would you say is your connection to the artistic legacy of LA?
C: Not to say there aren’t scenes anymore because there are some great scenes. There are so many good bands out of Philadelphia that all sound similar and are all friends, so it’s not like it doesn’t exist, but we were so fortunate to experience the last really significant wave of concentrated musical culture in New York. And because it died in such a dramatic and abrupt way that seemed so endemic to what was happening in the world, I think when we came to LA we just didn’t really ever look for it here. Coming to LA, what we were looking for was more space, and not just physical space but also mental space, because New York can feel so choked. LA kind of worked as the opposite of what we originally came from. We were trying to rework ourselves as a band and develop our own space, rather than operating within a bigger scene, like we had in New York.
Z: Yeah, it’s difficult to say and I’d be curious to know how younger people would respond to these questions, or similar questions about scenes, and musical history. I remember I read Please Kill Me, and it was so visceral reading that book because I also lived in New York, and I was able to point to all the landmarks. So I was able to really identify them even though it was such a different time. But now it must be so crazy to be, like, a fifteen-year-old, and read that book. How do you experience that? Do you just experience a total loss? Are you sad because that kind of music scene doesn’t exist anymore?
C: I think if you’re fifteen and reading that book your parents need to pay more attention to you.
Z: I just want to say also, about LA, that for me some of the really recognisable LA things, like the Capitol Building, which makes you think of the Beatles, or Elliott Smith walking down Sunset Boulevarde, were all sort of transplants, which is interesting. And a lot of the New York punk bands were transplants, too, and as a transplant, that makes me feel more welcomed.
Was there a moment where you realised that this aesthetic and mindset was going to be the direction you were heading in, with DIIV?
Z: I remember pitching the album title to the band. We were at this festival, during tour, and I was like ‘Guys, hear me out… ZIRP.’ It really all starts with the music for us, though, and all the thematic stuff is very much informed by that. So, once the songs started taking shape, there maybe was some direction, but not really until we had an idea that AG Cook was a person we wanted to work with. Because, then it started to cohesively take this futuristic path. And at the end of the path was this gate that everything would have to pass through, and AG Cook was that gate, which freed us up so much creatively. We could pretty much do whatever we wanted, because we knew that he would filter out the bad stuff, and everything would go through this system.
AG is an amazing producer and I’m super excited to get to that. But also I want to take a moment with your point about creative filtering. What risks have you taken now with the band that you never would have done with earlier records?
C: I think that different bands would answer this question much differently. I think it’s much more common for a band to have multiple records in a row that are cohesive, and then have a moment after like, three or four records, where they say ‘Ok, we’re gonna try something new, no more guitars.’ Or something like that. But all of our records are pretty distinct from one another, and so when we got to the fifth one, there was kind of a feeling where we could do whatever we wanted. And then obviously there’s a shared understanding of what a DIIV song feels like, to us, more than it being rigidly determined by a certain guitar effect or a certain mood. So, I think we’ve kind of been pushing for this risk-taking for a long time, and I’m not really sure why.
Z: For me, the risk is the fun part, and that’s where the creativity happens. A question that people ask a lot is ‘What advice would you give to a new band?’ or ‘What would you tell a shoegaze band who are starting?’ These kinds of questions. And I would answer by saying that any time you diverge from the common understanding of genre, that’s where you’re going to make your mark. And that’s where interesting things happen, musically. Maybe even to my own detriment, I really live by that, and try to take risks as much as possible. Because I find it exciting. And AG is similar, but he’s a lot smarter than me. He’s always looking for something new, and that newness comes from taking musical risks and diversions. There’s a lot of different ways to do it. Colin was saying the other day that one of our songs is in three different keys, which, to me, is a risk on a musical level. But I mean, that’s what I would encourage people to do, is roll the dice.
C: I want to think that most musicians and songwriters are ultimately trying to create something that feels true to them. And even music that I would maybe consider swill and private, a lot of times I get the sense that the writer really believes in, and the reason why it’s so successful is that people are connecting with the authenticity. For us, we’re just kind of pretentious, and the thing that we’re looking for in terms of something being true or us being inspired, doesn’t come from making a song that sounds exactly like something we’re already made. It requires a little more work. With a song in three keys, the challenge becomes, ‘How do we mould and shape all these crazy ideas into something?’ Which you don’t necessarily think about, you just experience it, as a song. I think our need to feel inspired about what we’re making, because of our taste and competitive spirit with each other, is what makes us do something new every time we’re in studio.
You were thinking about working with AG for some time before you started working together. Was the relationship with him how you thought it would be, and in what ways did he surprise you in the studio?
Z: It’s impossible to imagine the musical process beforehand. Maybe in a sense it went similarly to how I thought it would, but that’s because I knew he was really good. So watching him work was crazy. It’s like watching a Minecraft speedrunner. His level of precision, knowhow, and speed is unbelievable. There’s something very video-game about watching him produce. Sometimes we’ll record something and he’ll play it back and listen to it in context, and be like ‘Oh, that’s the spot.’ But he’ll play a half-second long snippet and detect that. That’s the sort of stuff you can’t predict about him. I also don’t think any of us expected him to like the band so much, or to feel the sense of reverence and importance that he did, about ‘This is what you guys are doing, and this is what you need to do.’ He mentioned his vision for that in a little artist bio clip, but we had kind of approached him with a different idea. We wanted him to do a Screamadelica thing. Take our simple songs and explode them. And he was kind of like, ‘We don’t need to do that.’ He saw the band live and said, ‘Do that.’ So that really surprised me, and it felt like a shot of confidence for all of us because having validation from somebody who is such a knowledgeable person about music, was very cool.
C: It’s also cool to get that kind of feedback and validation from someone who, although we have so much musically in common with him in a lot of regards, is in a different world than we are. And so for him to step in and hear our songs, and think they are really interesting and cool, gives us a lot of confidence to keep pursuing what we had envisioned for this album. He co-signed things in a way that was really inspiring and he definitely is part of the reason why we ended up getting pushed into these extremes. Not only because of confidence but because of his pop-producer approach, where he just keeps everything super minimal, with very few takes, and looking for magic instead of perfection. He was able to maintain that magic over time, to the point where sometimes it would feel like we hadn’t worked on a song at all, and then 20 minutes later I would realise the song is done. I don’t know how he does that, but there’s a lot of wizardry involved.
Zachary, I read something where you mentioned the idea of a publicly owned streaming library, which I thought was a great example of the sense of hope we can find in community. What are some of the good things you see happening in the music community where you are?
Z: There’s a lot of bad, but one thing that is exciting to me is that it feels like guitar music is very open. The meta game is open. And hearing what AG did on the Charli XCX record with her and Finn Keane is very cool. We’re seeing the guitar have this rebirth, and this re-invention in a pop space. It feels like in the little microgenres we listen to and follow, shoegaze being one of them, there’s a lot of forward momentum in progressive musicality which is really exciting. I feel like there’s a lot of great music and greater producers coming out of nowhere. There’s a kind of renaissance of people making homemade music, not in a 2010 way where it sounds like dog-shit, but in a way that sounds cool and the songs are good. That’s the era where we were born, but now it’s happening in this kind of new way where guitar bands are producing their own music. That all is really exciting, and there’s so many cool new artists everywhere.
DIIV's brand new album ZIRP! is out now via Fantasy Records
Available to listen here
