Zachary Cole Smith used to be a miserable interviewee. He had plenty to say \u2013 always generous, always voluble \u2013 but spoke with grim introspection, chastising himself and cataloguing his misdeeds with a fervour that engulfed him like his oversized T-shirts. A decade later, the Diiv frontman who materialises on my screen seems well rid of that old self. Suspiciously well rid of it, perhaps. He looks as if he has stepped out of a middle management meeting.<\/p>\n
\u201cPrecisely!\u201d Smith concurs cheerfully, speaking via video call from a back garden in La Ca\u00f1ada, California. \u201cWe\u2019re trying to have a visual language, which is fun. We\u2019ve never done that with what we wear.\u201d The singer-guitarist, 41, wears thick-rimmed square glasses, slicked-back black hair and a pinstripe shirt, its neck clasped by a tie printed with stock market emblems. He has an earnest but pranksterish energy. He uses the word \u201cfun\u201d so many times \u2013 more than a dozen within 10 minutes \u2013 that I suspect he is testing some sort of subliminal PR strategy.<\/p>\n
The Diiv album he is promoting is called Zirp! (meaning \u201czero interest-rate policy\u201d) and produced by Alex \u201cAG\u201d Cook, the bubbly, neon pop accelerationist and co-conspirator of Charli xcx. Cook is by no means a natural fit for Diiv, who are one of the least garish bands around. Their buzzy early albums set 80s goth to a motorik pulse, with dream-pop riffs refracted like sunlight into a cobwebbed drawing room. Though they have likely benefited from the TikTok-aided shoegaze revival, their fourth album, 2024\u2019s Frog in Boiling Water, waded into the swamp of anti-capitalist ennui. Cook has helped airlift them out: on Zirp!, for the first time in years, Diiv sound like they are finally having \u2013 hang on a minute \u2026<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Diiv: The Fountain \u2013 video<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s fun to do something fun,\u201d proclaims Smith, smoking the first of several cigarettes. Today\u2019s costume, accordingly, is based on a darkly comic figure: \u201cthe recession-era, stock market crash guy\u201d. Smith strikes a pose like Rodin\u2019s Thinker if he had just cost his hedge fund a billion dollars. \u201cThis kind of vibe, with the dishevelled suit.\u201d<\/p>\n
To go with the look, the band coined a tongue-in-cheek genre dubbed the New Alternative. It reminds Smith of both the loathed Thatcherite slogan \u201cthere is no alternative\u201d and the influential Mark Fisher book Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? \u201cI really want to reclaim that word,\u201d Smith says. \u201cThere is an alternative to capitalism.\u201d<\/p>\n
For starters, he dreams of a publicly owned streaming library that could operate as an alternative to the current ecosystem, particularly Spotify. \u201cI do feel that that company absolutely should not exist and should be dismantled,\u201d he says. \u201cFor Spotify, [music] is just fodder in their ecosystem. They\u2019re selling tech. Apple is a company that\u2019s selling phones. And music is this resource that they can pillage and plunder.\u201d<\/p>\n
Zachary Cole Smith at FYF Fest 2016 in Los Angeles. Photograph: Kevin Winter\/Getty Images<\/p>\n
New songs Evangelizer and The Crash are similarly forthright: the former, a wraithlike monologue, depicts \u201cBlackRock master keys\u201d and \u201cPalantir-Pfizer collab pills\u201d in what Smith calls a \u201cpost-capitalist hellscape\u201d; the latter is a wonky, end-of-days art-pop screed by a narrator determined to \u201cthrow the billionaires screaming in an alligator pit\u201d. As to what a New Alternative might be, he concedes that the term, for now, describes nothing beyond a break from \u201csome kind of norm\u201d. He shrugs helplessly, then seems to remember he is wearing a tie. \u201cAlternative stocks are up!\u201d he declares.<\/p>\n
One afternoon in January 2025, Smith invited his bandmates to his home in Altadena to demo My Star, a thrashing alt-rock love song to his one-year-old son. As they left, a windstorm was brewing. When nearby Eaton Canyon went up in flames in the wildfires, Smith and his wife, who was seven months pregnant, decided to gather their son\u2019s belongings. \u201cWe gotta do bedtime,\u201d he remembers thinking. \u201cLet\u2019s just pack up his little crib and his little jammies and get a hotel room, and then the power won\u2019t go out.\u201d<\/p>\n
By 3am, their hotel secured, Altadena was ablaze. \u201cOur neighbours were describing the scene: it\u2019s raining orange, it\u2019s snowing orange.\u201d Three hours later, \u201ceverything was gone. Then at 6.30am, our son woke up and was just like, \u2018What are we doing today!\u2019\u201d As their adrenaline ebbed, the gravity of the loss struck. \u201cAll of a sudden, we had nothing. But once he woke up, we just had to make everything be normal.\u201d<\/p>\n
Their home was now a pile of rubble beside the burnt-out carcass of a car. Finding a new place was hard \u201cbecause so many people were displaced\u201d, says Smith. A series of temporary lodgings led the family \u2013 now including their second child \u2013 to the La Ca\u00f1ada house where they have lived for the past six months, awaiting a distant peaceful life. \u201cWhere we\u2019re at now feels like where we\u2019ll be until we rebuild our house, which is a slow process,\u201d he says. \u201cBut one that, I think, at some point, will become fun.\u201d<\/p>\n
Diiv in 2016, from left: Devin Ruben Perez, Zachary Cole Smith, Ben Newman, Andrew Bailey and Colin Caulfield. Photograph: David A Smith\/Getty Images<\/p>\n
Work on Zirp! swiftly resumed. Inspired by a 2023 arena tour supporting Depeche Mode \u2013 and a dip into the band\u2019s 1980s catalogue \u2013 Smith had already decided to \u201csurrender perfectionism, work quickly and not be precious\u201d. Having run into Cook at a party, he cemented the partnership after hearing the grunge anthem Bewitched from the producer\u2019s triple album Britpop. Cook renders Diiv\u2019s shoegaze textures as if in arcade mode: portentous riffs wriggle like pop-punk earworms; feedback harbours micro melodies like radio jingles. \u201cKnowing the songs were gonna wind up in front of Alex made it so much more fun to take risks,\u201d says Smith.<\/p>\n
There were other benefits to recruiting an auteur producer. Though Smith single-handedly produced and masterminded the first two Diiv albums, the band gradually became more collaborative as he treated, and finally cut out, his drug use. \u201cAddiction is all about control,\u201d he says. \u201cYou want to block out what anybody else is saying, so it lends itself really well to dictatorship.\u201d<\/p>\n
His addiction had become a minor scandal in 2013<\/a>, when Smith and then-girlfriend Sky Ferreira were arrested for possession of heroin and ecstasy (he took full responsibility). He went to rehab, left and relapsed. He spent four years talking up Diiv\u2019s second album and playing lacklustre shows<\/a> in a period of heightened scrutiny: drummer Colby Hewitt was dealing with his own substance use and bassist Devin Ruben Perez had been exposed for bigoted messageboard posts. (Both left the band.) As Diiv threatened to slip through his fingers, Smith became preoccupied with collecting rare coral reefs in a 50-gallon saltwater tank at his Brooklyn apartment.<\/p>\n Channelling a \u2018spirit of fun and playfulness and risk and experimentation\u2019. Photograph: Louie Kovatch<\/p>\n With the help of his girlfriend (whom he married in 2020) and mother-in-law, Smith kicked drugs in 2017. The \u201cego destruction\u201d of sobering up prompted him to democratise the band. \u201cI\u2019ve worked to repair the trust with my bandmates and whoever I damaged during my active addiction,\u201d he says. \u201cI just want to utilise that to get us to where we want to be,\u201d moving forward in a \u201cspirit of fun and playfulness and risk and experimentation\u201d.<\/p>\n Smith has spoken relentlessly about all those he has let down and lied to. After all that, I ask, how did it feel to receive $100,000 in crowdfunded wildfire aid for his family, from a community that trusts and supports him? \u201cI want to cry just thinking about it,\u201d he says, choking up. \u201cIt taught me something, you know? It was profound. I\u2019ve never experienced love like that. And it did feel like \u2026\u201d He sighs. \u201cI felt like I deserved it.\u201d As part of his recovery, Smith has helped others living with addiction and maintained a network of the similarly afflicted. \u201cI feel like we earned it through being good to our friends, family and communities,\u201d he says, \u201cbeing available to people or letting a band borrow the van. I don\u2019t know how I would have learned that lesson any other way. But it was probably the most meaningful thing that\u2019s ever happened to me, on an interpersonal level.\u201d<\/p>\n The rebuilding of Smith\u2019s family home remains clogged up in various city-planning departments. \u201cBut the Altadena community is stronger than it\u2019s ever been,\u201d he says, lighting another cigarette. \u201cThe relationships we have with other families that lived on our street is remarkable. Even the crowdfunding \u2013 the silver lining is how it showed this sense of community, lifting each other up.\u201d For a little while, it seemed as if the fire would consume their whole world. \u201cIt could have felt really alienating, but luckily, we had each other.\u201d<\/p>\n Zirp! is released via Fantasy Recordings on 30 October<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Zachary Cole Smith used to be a miserable interviewee. He had plenty to say \u2013 always generous, always…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":849433,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[49,48,75,341],"class_list":["post-849432","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-music","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-entertainment","tag-music"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/849432","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=849432"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/849432\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/849433"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=849432"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=849432"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=849432"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}