{"id":283454,"date":"2026-05-07T22:14:10","date_gmt":"2026-05-07T22:14:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/283454\/"},"modified":"2026-05-07T22:14:10","modified_gmt":"2026-05-07T22:14:10","slug":"diiv-brought-dreamy-absurdity-to-tulips-in-fort-worth","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/283454\/","title":{"rendered":"DIIV Brought Dreamy Absurdity to Tulips in Fort Worth"},"content":{"rendered":"

DIIV\u2019s music has always lived in a space where beauty and damage share a lease. On Wednesday night at Tulips in Fort Worth<\/a>, the Brooklyn band made that tension feel physical. The room didn\u2019t just hear DIIV\u2019s songs. It sat inside them, enveloped by distortion, submerged in mood and nudged along by a show that was as funny, strange and unsettling as it was genuinely moving.<\/p>\n

This stop in Fort Worth<\/a> felt like a return with purpose. After the band\u2019s previous swing through North Texas in support of \u201cFrog in Boiling Water\u201d in 2024, DIIV came back sounding even more locked into the album\u2019s warped emotional weather. On record, that 2024 release plays like a transmission from a world that is burned out, overmediated and still somehow searching for grace. Played live, those ideas became a full environment.<\/p>\n

Even before the first proper song, DIIV made it clear this would not be a standard rock set. The band entered to a video clip of Fred Durst introducing them with the exaggerated pomp of a late-night TV announcer. It was absurd and perfect. It also set the tone for an evening that understood the value of undercutting its own mystique. DIIV can be ethereal, but it\u2019s not precious. The band knows how to wink without breaking the spell.<\/p>\n

That balance defined the whole performance. Between songs, the band used a stream of corporate-video-style interludes, deadpan ad language and deliberately mundane visual fragments that played like a satire of modern emptiness. At one point, the audio and graphics resembled the kind of lifeless internal training video that tells employees to smile harder and sell more merchandise. Later, the recorded voice turned openly absurd: \u201cAll your problems will melt away with a simple purchase of DIIV merchandise.\u201d Another mock-sincere segment thanked \u201cour sponsor, Coinbase Facebook.\u201d The joke landed because DIIV never overplayed it. The band let the bizarre audiovisual filler do its own quiet damage.<\/p>\n

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CLOSE\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n

More importantly, those interludes solved one of the great practical problems of live music: dead air. While the band retuned and shifted gears, the room never lost momentum. The transitions became part of the art. Instead of the usual pause-and-mumble reset, DIIV made the in-between feel essential, as if the show existed not just in the songs but in the static between them.<\/p>\n

Musically, the set was excellent and carefully paced. Opening with \u201cHorsehead,\u201d the band wasted no time establishing that dense, glimmering wall of sound it does so well \u2014 part shoegaze cloud bank, part post-punk undertow. \u201cLike Before You Were Born\u201d and \u201cUnder the Sun\u201d followed with a sense of lift and drift, dreamy but never soft. DIIV\u2019s gift is that it can sound narcotic and punishing all at once. The guitars shimmer, then scrape. The melodies float, then bruise.<\/p>\n

The newer material sat naturally alongside older favorites. \u201cBrown Paper Bag,\u201d \u201cSoul-net\u201d and the title track from \u201cFrog in Boiling Water\u201d all carried a peculiar live power. \u201cSoul-net\u201d in particular gained extra bite in the context of the night\u2019s faux-wellness and pseudo-corporate visuals. A recorded voice in one segment cheerfully insisted, \u201cCapitalism is not the root cause of your personal issues,\u201d then added, \u201cWe believe that resistance is not the solution.\u201d The band let that kind of poisoned self-help language hang in the air, then answered it with music that felt human, frayed and defiantly messy.<\/p>\n

\"\"The Brooklyn band is wrapping up a tour in support of 2024\u2019s \u201cFrog in Boiling Water.\u201d<\/p>\n

Onstage, DIIV was magnetic without being theatrical in any conventional sense. Frontman Zachary Cole Smith kept the focus where it belonged: on the songs, the texture and the slow build of tension. He was not hyper-chatty. Near the end, he kept it simple: \u201cThank you very much,\u201d then, \u201cThank you to Draag for playing with us tonight.\u201d It was brief, sincere and in keeping with the band\u2019s understated presence.<\/p>\n

The movement came from elsewhere. Guitarist Andrew Bailey was impossible to ignore, lurching and jerking around the stage with a kind of loose-limbed ferocity, like a possessed punk kid trapped in a shoegaze band. He played with force and weird charisma, constantly pushing energy outward. Bassist Colin Caulfield, by contrast, was more obscured, often hidden behind a curtain of hair, but no less committed. Together, they gave the music a physical dimension that kept it from becoming merely immersive.<\/p>\n

That impact grew as the set moved toward its closing stretch. \u201cBlankenship\u201d brought a familiar jolt. \u201cDoused\u201d arrived like a long exhale from the crowd, its pulse and aching release reminding everyone why it remains one of the band\u2019s most beloved songs. By the time DIIV closed with \u201cBetween Tides,\u201d Tulips felt less like a club than a chamber of shared weather \u2014 heavy, electric and oddly cleansing.<\/p>\n

If DIIV built the night\u2019s strange cathedral, Los Angeles five-piece Draag<\/a> laid its crooked foundation. Their opening set was short, about 30 minutes, and all the better for its refusal to waste any of them. Draag does not make dream pop in the soft-focus sense. Its music is abrasive, smeared and unpredictable, more like a collage of beautiful wrong turns than a cleanly plotted set of songs.<\/p>\n

\"\"Draag set the tone for DIIV\u2019s Fort Worth show with raw, experimental energy.<\/p>\n

Working through tracks including \u201cOrb Weaver,\u201d \u201cMiracle Drug,\u201d \u201cDemonbird\u201d and \u201cRecharge,\u201d the band created a kind of organized disorientation. Vocals dissolved into the mix. Rhythms felt as if they might split apart at any moment. Noise and melody kept colliding, then somehow holding. Before one song, a band member asked, \u201cCan I get more vocal here? Because there\u2019s room.\u201d Even that stray bit of stage chatter fit the set\u2019s loose, exploratory spirit. Draag sounded like a band less interested in perfection than in discovery, and the audience benefited from that freedom.<\/p>\n

The result was an opener that did more than warm up the room. Draag established the evening\u2019s central mood: weird, searching and gloriously unconcerned with neat edges.<\/p>\n

That, in the end, was the triumph of Wednesday night at Tulips. DIIV and Draag offered a show that embraced dissonance in every sense \u2014 sonic, emotional and visual \u2014 and made it feel coherent. There were moments of absurdity and moments of genuine lift. There was a merch joke delivered like a cult pitch and a set of songs that still managed to feel intimate inside all the irony.<\/p>\n

Some bands want to transport you. DIIV did something better. It made Fort Worth feel briefly unmoored, suspended between burnout and transcendence, between the ugly machinery of modern life and the small, stubborn thrill of escaping it for an hour.<\/p>\n

DIIV closes out its southwest tour with stops May 7 in Houston and May 8 in Austin. Houston is sold out, but tickets for the Austin show, as part of Austin Psych Fest, are still available through DIIV\u2019s website. Single-day tickets for May 8 are $98.27<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"DIIV\u2019s music has always lived in a space where beauty and damage share a lease. On Wednesday night…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":283455,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[2171,116,118,117,3503],"class_list":["post-283454","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-fort-worth","tag-concert-reviews","tag-fort-worth","tag-fort-worth-headlines","tag-fort-worth-news","tag-rock-music"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/283454","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=283454"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/283454\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/283455"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=283454"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=283454"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=283454"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}