With ‘ZIRP!’ out this week, Zachary Cole Smith talks A. G. Cook, anti-capitalist propaganda, fatherhood, and why Spotify is a ZIRP company.

‘ZIRP!’ is pop record, but it never stops sounding like DIIV. The guitars still swirl the way they always have, yet the songs are faster, the hooks are bigger, and voice finally sits right at the front.

Opener ‘The Fountain’ pairs the band’s old shoegaze squall with a synth pulse that’s new for them, while ‘Trillions’ goes full Auto-Tuned pop to send up a world obsessed with money. Produced by A. G. Cook and named after the zero interest rate policies behind the tech boom, it’s fun on the surface and carefully thought through underneath.

Talking to Cole was a lot like listening to the record: we laughed a lot, but he meant every word.

You played Jakarta in July. I’m Indonesian, so I have to ask: what do you remember?

Every time we go to Indonesia it’s so much fun. The fans are really excited, and there’s a real excitement for specifically the kind of music we make. We’ve got friends in Jakarta who show us around, and it’s such a fun city to be in. When we were there, it was the final of the World Cup. At four in the morning, after the show, there were people in the street watching the game on a huge projector, going crazy. It was really fun.

What’s on the tour bus playlist these days?

A lot of the time we’ll just put YouTube on the TV, like two hours of MTV from 2002. But there’s a lot of new music we’re excited about, including bands we’re taking on tour: Spirit of the Beehive, who we love, and a new band called Deer Park. We all listen to totally different things, so we show each other stuff. One record we all love is the new @ album, ‘Autosmile’. It’s so fun and funny and beautiful.

You play London on November 7th, your birthday. What should people expect?

It’ll be different from the ‘Frog’ tours. That record was slow and brooding, and the show had a lot of visual overstimulation, with videos and fake ads trying to mirror the world we live in. It was kind of overwhelming. This time we want to strip all that away to just the band playing the songs. The new songs are fast and energetic, so the show has a different energy. We were really proud of the last show, but we want to try something else.

The ‘ZIRP!’ look is a long way from cool. Where did it come from?

I think the point of the ‘ZIRP!’ look is that it looks kind of bad. We want to look a little out of place, so it’s thrift-store suits that don’t fit quite right. It was really inspired by the stockbroker archetype from the recession era, the guy who’s just lost it all. He’s dishevelled and his tie’s crooked.

You used to model for Saint Laurent. Did any of that feed into it?

When I was doing that stuff, I felt a bit awkward and out of place. So maybe there’s that idea of the clothes wearing you. There’s something fun about wearing costumes and embodying an archetype. It’s almost a rebellion against us being young and cool and doing high-fashion stuff: flip it and try to look as uncool as we possibly can.

DIIV has been going for 15 years. How do you keep a band together that long?

Stubbornness. So many things make it difficult, and we just refuse to stop. But it’s also about keeping it exciting for ourselves, reinventing the band or the sound a little with every album. Breaking your own rules, trying new sounds: that’s what makes me want to keep doing it.

‘My Star’ sounds like a lullaby to me. Is it for your kids?

In some ways it’s the most twisted, crazy-sounding song, with these really distorted guitars and loud, dissonant parts, so it felt fun to subvert that and make it just a love song. For my kids, yeah, that’s the concept, so it is sort of lullaby-ish. It’s funny: the demo was called ‘Lullaby’.

Let’s talk about how the record was made. Why A. G. Cook?

I’ve looked up to him and his music for over a decade. It felt like we had similar trajectories, coming out of scenes that were happening at the same time, us in New York and him in London, and I think we were aware of each other. He’s always played around with rock paradigms. Songs like ‘Oh Yeah’ play with rock and subvert it. Then he made this insane-sounding rock album with his project Thy Slaughter, and ‘Britpop’ had moments of really boundary-pushing, forward-thinking rock. That’s what enticed us.

We obviously knew what he could do in the pop world, but it wasn’t, “Let’s make a pop record, hit up the pop guy.” It was, “Let’s push our boundaries with this really smart, boundary-pushing guy.” We’re interested in records that are conceptual, thought out and funny. He seemed like a kindred spirit.

A. G. Cook has said the original plan, rebuilding your demos Screamadelica-style, felt completely wrong to him. What changed?

From his perspective, and I think he’s right, one thing DIIV is really good at is being a live band. Having him rip the songs apart moved us away from that. It was important to him to be faithful to what DIIV really is: a live band who’s good at playing the songs. It was a confidence thing too. We needed somebody to say, “Do what you’re good at.” And we were like, “Oh, I guess we are pretty good at that. Cool.” I think the record sounds confident partly because of that.

‘Kid’ started with The KLF’s ‘The Manual’, which treats pop as a bit sinister. What does pop mean to you?

In some ways, pop can be a tool of propaganda, and we really thought about making propaganda that’s anti-corporate or anti-capitalist. It started with A. G. saying, “You should write a song with just a simple pop chord progression.” We were really uncomfortable with that at first, so we started thinking about The KLF’s manual. It’s not saying pop is sinister, but it lays out these very specific rules and traditions. It felt fun to play with them and subvert them, while also using them to say something counter to traditional pop propaganda.

The last album was written by the whole band. This one started with you. Why?

The band was still very involved, but in a more modular way. The thing we wanted to throw away was making decisions as a group. It’s really hard to decide anything when everyone has to agree, and there are four of us, so we can’t even vote. I wanted to take some of the decision-making power back, not for my own desires, but to simplify things and have a process that was less brutal.

Colin came up with a lot of vocal melodies. Bailey made sample patterns that were sometimes the base a song was written from. Ben wrote a lot of the synth lines. But it was in the spirit of fun, because at the final stage A. G. decided what stayed. We’d propose ideas and he’d be the decisive one: this, yes; this, no. That was really helpful.

You mentioned your kids. How has being a dad changed how you write about the world falling apart?

Accountability is a big part of it. The last record was right before we had our first kid, so there was a lot of fear: what are we bringing this person into? But as a dad, you spend so much time in the moment, playing and having fun. There’s not much space for the big stuff. If they say they’re thirsty, you get water. If they want to play a game, cool.

That really informed how this record was made. We tried to embody that lesson from the kids: be in the moment, embrace a sense of play. Fun is the reason we wanted to make music in the first place, and it’s easy to forget that when it’s your career. There’s play across the whole record, even when it’s serious, and I think you can hear it.

The bio says ‘ZIRP!’ is about growing up and glowing up. Do you want to be pop stars?

Obviously we want the band to be successful, but mostly so we can keep making music. It’s a difficult world to make a living in, so the more success we have, the more possible it is to keep going. A lot of times in the history of the band, it’s felt like things were hanging on by a thread, and we kept going out of stubbornness, or passion, or a feeling that things would get better.

That’s part of growing up too. We’ve got families, we have bills to pay. Music is a reflection of the people who made it, and in 15 years there’s been a lot of personal change. We don’t want to pretend we’re still 24, or that our scene in New York still exists. In a sense, that makes people uncomfortable. They see the video for ‘Kid’ and they’re like, “Oh shit, these guys have gotten older. They have kids.” It confronts you with the fact that you’ve gotten older too. But it’s not worth hiding from. It would be inauthentic to act like it’s not happening. I’m proud of our growth as a band, and of my own growing up, and making music that reflects that is really important to me.

Your voice is much louder on this record. Given the subject matter, I half expected you to sound more jaded. Why bring it to the front?

Part of it is confidence. When we started, I didn’t really want to be the singer. Somebody had to be, and if I was writing the songs, I had to sing them. I was scared; I’d never really sung before. And in that era of homemade bedroom pop, it was acceptable, even encouraged, for music to be lo-fi, scrappy and kind of shitty-sounding, which let me bury the vocals in an aesthetic way. Over time I’ve gotten better and more confident, and like we were saying about growing up, I’m proud of that progress.

It’s also about making music that’s very human. The voice is the simplest, most direct way to do that. I didn’t want a wall between the music, the lyrics and the listener. And pop music is basically vocals and drums. If we’re putting our money where our mouth is about making accessible alternative music, we couldn’t hide from that.

Fans got a business card with a hotline before the album was even announced. Is that marketing, or is it art?

On this album we really wanted to play with the idea of marketing, because it’s so linked to the culture we’re critiquing. ZIRP, the US economic policy we named the album after, was defined by big tech companies getting free money and using it to market themselves as disrupting existing industries. So we wanted to treat marketing as raw material in an artistic context. It’s also built into pop. A friend once told me the difference between pop and indie is that pop has marketing built into it, and there’s something fun about playing with that.

The hotline is a classic marketing pitch: this product will change your life. But we also believe it. Music can change your life, and it’s changed my life so many times. So we try to walk a line between poking fun at marketing and sincerely using it in a way that’s genuine to us.

‘Trillions’ started as an attempt to get into Spotify’s Billions Club. How much of that was a joke?

We thought it was fun to appropriate some of the tools of capital in order to critique it. If you’re a musician, writing a good, catchy pop song is something everybody has in mind, so I don’t think it’s a bad thing. But with this song we wanted to experiment with those capitalist marketing strategies: a simple, hooky song, and Auto-Tune, which is the ultimate symbol of corporate artifice. Musically it works, and on its own I think it’s a good song. But it takes its critique and embeds it in a form that embodies the thing it’s critiquing.

You co-founded the United Musicians and Allied Workers. How does that show up on ‘ZIRP!’?

UMAW was really a community-building exercise, a way for musicians to unite in an industry that pits you against each other. To talk about systemic problems, or how much we’re getting paid: information a lot of people wouldn’t share, but it feels important. Community solidarity is the antidote to the hyper-individualised, crabs-in-a-bucket mentality that’s so endemic to American culture, and to any capitalist society.

‘ZIRP!’ is really about that: as society collapses, rebuilding a world in a communal sense. And music is community. It’s a social tool. People build their identities on it and make friendships over it. You go to a concert and it’s a room full of people who like the same music. To me, that’s so important.

You talk a lot about who can still afford to make music. If DIIV started over in 2012, could you exist without Spotify?

2012 is actually a perfect example of a great alternative. That was the blog era, with a lot of peer-to-peer, decentralised sharing and downloading. That was the pinnacle of music discovery for me. I discovered more music than I ever had before.

The problem with Spotify is that it reads as a free music library, but really all the money is being taken by a big tech company. Delete them from the equation. A public, socialised streaming library, built on community rather than exploitative tech, is the best alternative. People have written proposals for public streaming libraries, and I think that’s the remedy to the streaming problem.

I expected you to say: go back to record shops.

Record stores are great, because they’re also a community space. You can walk in and say, “I like this band, what else would I like?” and there’s a person who can tell you. Remembering that music is a social, communal experience is really important.

DIIV has still reached a lot of people through Spotify, though.

You can say we benefit from Spotify, but we don’t. We struggle to make a living, even though we’re a band that’s successful in a sense. Part of what we’re critiquing on this album is that business model. Spotify is a ZIRP company: a tech company that disrupted an existing industry and siphoned the money away from music workers to the billionaire tech class. It’s one example of what’s led to the downfall we’re seeing, a miniature of what’s happening globally.

But we use it. You still have to participate in society. No matter how much we’d like to disappear into the woods, it’s not feasible. That’s the problem with monopolies: there’s no viable alternative. So it’s our job to build one in our communities. That’s part of what the union was, and what a public streaming library could be. We haven’t built it yet, but that’s the nature of living under corporate monopoly.

Any last word on ‘ZIRP!’?

‘ZIRP!’ is a fun record. It’s a good record, and we think people will have fun listening to it. There’s a lot to digest, but even without engaging with everything we’re playing with, it’s still a fun record. Give it a shot.

‘ZIRP!’ is out now. DIIV headline Pitchfork Music Festival London’s Dalston Takeover on Saturday November 7th.