Not content with producing music that fits into the standard dream-pop paradigm, DIIV are turning up the attitude with their new robust, misgiving sound. Outlandish and rotten, Zachary Cole Smith’s new-found noise is a far cry from his first DIIV record, as new tracks ‘Dopamine’ and ‘Bent (Roi’s Song)’ continue to redesign his band’s sugar-sweet tones and diluted dream-pop personality.
No other track from the band’s discography grasps this new, punky ethos more than the sour-candied ‘Mire (Grant’s Song)’. Rumbling off-beat like a dreary Nirvana B-side, the open chord lashing of guitars and harmonically-infused baselines flesh out a despairing and raw skeletal sound. Deeply troubling and bitter-tasting, ‘Mire (Grant’s Song)’ is one-part grudge and one-part indie-pop: a hazy meeting point between the cosmic mayhem of Sonic Youth and the hushed tones of Keaton Henson. With his angelic face, Zachary Cole Smith has unearthed a devilish new sound.
“With the third instalment of their forthcoming record, the lazy-boy New Yorkers have produced their deepest and most unsettling track yet”
Fine-tuned yet lethargic, the grizzling feedback of the amplifiers give the track a washed out, sleepy feel. As a band used to playing at damp, sweaty venues, their usually crisp songwriting has been dirtied with an angry and troubled vapour; it’s slow, hampered, and weighed down by Zachary Cole Smith’s problems, a quality that has watermarked DIIV’s back catalogue of melancholia-meets-euphoria alternative rock. Lyrically, the track is agitated, yet enlightening: “I was blind and now I see / You made a believer out of me / I was high / Now I feel low”.
It is not, however, crushingly sad, or to the point where you find yourself reaching for the Jack Daniels and Oxycodone. It is a tune in deliberate free-fall, a hint of what is to come in DIIV’s next eery LP incarnation, Is The Is Are. As deeply unsettling songs go, ‘Mire (Grant’s Song)’ does a good job of getting you excited. With the third instalment of their forthcoming record, the lazy-boy New Yorkers have produced their deepest and most unsettling track yet.
You can listen to ‘Mire (Grant’s Song)’ here, via Captured Tracks.