The most surprising element of DIIV ’s fifth album is that they waited this long to make something like it. From the mid-2010s on, the pop-crossover gesture has become an exceedingly common trend in all flavors of indie. But up to this point, DIIV have endured—thrived, even—because of their refusal to capitulate to the industry winds that swirled around them. 2016’s expansive Is the Is Are was an impressive and literal doubling-down on the luscious licks and perfumed smog that coated their 2012 debut Oshin , while its 2019 follow-up, Deceiver , thickened the broth with pure shoegaze squall, several years before it was au courant to do so.

By the time the quartet re-emerged in 2024 with the grungy, gorgeously terrifying Frog in Boiling Water , DIIV had become accidental quasi-elder statesmen of nü-gaze’s digitally native confines without a single forced tweak to their own guiding principles. Logic would follow that ZIRP!…