DIIV Return to Hong Kong As A Very Different Band

Description

DIIV’s music exists in a sweet sonic space, somewhere between the bedroom and the stadium stage. Hyped by incessant basslines, reverb-soaked guitars and a driving rhythmic pulse, the band’s best-loved tunes can be infectious and danceable; but troubled frontman Zachary Cole Smith’s deliberately buried vocals – like a songbird take on early Michael Stipe – lend even their early, beachy hits a psychic insularity that it’s hard to shake. 

Hailing from hipster Brooklyn, DIIV’s Pitchfork-approved debut Oshin (2012) won indie kudos and birthed enduring top-streamer “Douse.” This fashionably adrift, dreamy sonic ethos was refined on 2016’s 17-track Is the Is Are, which many fairweather fans might consider a career high. Some listeners may be surprised they survived the spotlight. After battling personal issues that threatened the whole enterprise’s existence, the quartet emerged denser and darker on the cathartic Deceiver (2019); most recent release Frog in Boiling Water (2024) is the sound of a group “in it for the long haul,” or so say Stereogum. 

Still on the fence? Those songs sound both bleaker and better on last year’s live album, Boiled Alive, which intersperses droney, downbeat tunes with parodic recorded ad-breaks and talking heads taking down big oil, late-stage capitalism, and generally underscoring the maturity of a band not afraid to speak its mind. Let’s hope those moments of black comedy gold appear on the group’s much-anticipated Asia tour – which brings them back to Hong Kong for the first time in nine years. 

Oh, and if you’re wondering, it’s just pronounced “dive,” but spelt funny to avoid turf-treading a band with the same name.