hypersongs

DIIV

A Brooklyn band formed in 2011 by the guitarist and singer Zachary Cole Smith, whose interlocking, reverb-heavy guitars on Oshin (2012) made it a defining dream-pop record of its year.

From Dive to DIIV

Zachary Cole Smith started the band in 2011 as a vehicle for his own songs, after playing guitar for Soft Black and drums and guitar for Beach Fossils. It was first called Dive, after the Nirvana song, and became DIIV in May 2012, partly out of respect for a Belgian industrial band of the same name, Dive; the change was announced on May 2, 2012 with the single "Doused". Smith signed to Captured Tracks in October 2011 and wrote most of the songs for Oshin in a short burst in a Bushwick loft that May; early singles "Sometime" and "Human" appeared on the label in 2011.

In the first line-up were the bassist Devin Ruben Perez, the guitarist Andrew Bailey and the drummer Colby Hewitt, with Ben Newman, credited as Ben Wolf, playing drums on four of the album's tracks. Colin Caulfield joined in July 2013 and Newman became the full-time drummer in April 2015. Smith has named krautrock, C86, Nirvana and Malian guitar music as influences.

The records

Oshin came out on June 26, 2012 and was rated 80 on Metacritic; Pitchfork's Ian Cohen gave it 8.3 and called it a gorgeous and unusually melodic dream pop record, and Pitchfork later placed it 26th among its thirty best dream pop albums. The band supported The Vaccines in the UK and Japandroids in the US that autumn and made its network television debut on Late Show with David Letterman on December 13, 2012. Oshin was briefly out of print in 2014 over a dispute about its cover art and was reissued in June 2015 with new artwork; a tenth-anniversary double LP followed in 2022 with demos and live recordings.

Is the Is Are (February 5, 2016, Captured Tracks), seventeen songs in 63 minutes, was recorded mostly in March 2015 at Strange Weather and The Bunker in Brooklyn and produced by Smith; it reached number 81 on the Billboard 200 and scored 72 on Metacritic. Smith said the main concept was making something very transparent and human. Deceiver (October 4, 2019), produced by DIIV and Sonny Diperri at 64 Sound in Los Angeles, was the first written and recorded by the full band. Frog in Boiling Water (May 24, 2024, Fantasy Records) was produced by Chris Coady and took its title from Daniel Quinn's novel The Story of B. In 2023 they opened for Depeche Mode on the Memento Mori tour, and a KEXP session followed in June 2024. A fifth album, ZIRP!, produced by A. G. Cook, is announced for October 30, 2026.

Albums

  • Oshin 2012 · Captured Tracks

    The 2012 debut: thirteen short, bright guitar songs recorded in Brooklyn and named for an Inuit print on its cover.

Songs

  • Doused Oshin · 2012

    Track twelve of Oshin and the first song released under the name DIIV, on May 2, 2012.

Sources

  1. DIIV, Wikipedia
  2. Is the Is Are, Wikipedia
  3. Deceiver (DIIV album), Wikipedia
  4. DIIV interview, DIY (2016-01-02)