DIIV: ZIRP! (indie exclusive, gold vinyl)

Why you'll love it

The indie store exclusive on opaque gold vinyl, in deluxe packaging. ZIRP! is DIIV's fifth album, the follow-up to 2024's Frog in Boiling Water, and it was produced by A. G. Cook, the PC Music founder known for his work with Charli XCX and Caroline Polachek.

This edition

Indie exclusive
Opaque gold vinyl
Deluxe packaging
Eleven tracks, six on Side A and five on Side B

About the album

DIIV have spent more than a decade making some of the most gorgeous guitar records around, all shimmering chords and dreamy, drifting vocals, and their last album, Frog in Boiling Water, found them at their heaviest and most pointed. For ZIRP! they surprised everyone by bringing in A. G. Cook, a producer better known for hyper-modern pop. Rather than turn them into something else, Cook built the record around the band's live sound, tracking live drums early and spending long sessions on layered guitars and pedals instead of a computer screen.

The result is still unmistakably DIIV, just brighter and more vivid. "The Fountain" opens in a haze of guitars, "Kid" and "Trillions" have some of the catchiest hooks they have written, and "Dare Me" and "Evangelizer" swirl and surge in that trademark shoegaze way. "My Star" and "Idiot in the Sky" close things on a dreamy, slightly unsettled note. It is a record for headphones and late nights, best played loud enough to get lost in. Do mind the volume knob; it is closer to eleven than you think.