Different Press teamed up with DIIV for an unique ZIRP! zine, printed in restricted portions. Head to the AP Store to seize yours.
Someplace within the early ’90s, the that means of “different” acquired misplaced. By 1991, punk broke, inciting a major-label frenzy that solely invested in different bands as a result of they may crack the charts. 5 years later, these charts had been largely steered by Clear Channel, when the Telecommunications Act of 1996 allowed conglomerates to purchase a whole lot of native radio stations. They demolished impartial, homespun programming by looping the identical 20 songs, relegating regional scenes to one thing your unemployed good friend was into. By then, different turned from a rejection of the mainstream into the mainstream itself — an aesthetic packaged and offered again to the plenty, stripped of its grain for gloss that chipped on the edges. Besides when the whole lot turns into different, nothing is.
Learn extra: 100 gecs hack the planet
It’s 2026 now, however different is simply simply beginning to get the house to stretch its legs once more. So when DIIV revealed their subsequent album, ZIRP!, via a hotline — introduced as “the way forward for different multimedia leisure” — it felt like an intriguing step ahead for a band that function in density, each of their pedal-warped songs and themes of dependancy and ennui. With it got here one other label to contemplate: “The New Different,” a time period that makes an attempt to explain the genre-breaking renaissance of the 2020s because the world burned at our toes. Fairly actually, with the 2025 wildfires that raged in Los Angeles taking frontman Zachary Cole Smith’s dwelling.
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Louie Kovatch
As of late, different has morphed right into a disposition, an angle, a way of life, slightly than a particular sound, although you realize it while you hear it. Turnstile are free to hyperlink up with Slayyyter and Blood Orange. Deftones can sit subsequent to Charli XCX, Fiona Apple adjoining to Jane Remover. It’s 100 gecs frying System of a Down’s “Toxicity” with beat drops on Boiler Room, PinkPantheress being impressed by Paramore however her chopped, jungle-inspired loops sounding nothing like them. Typically the contrasts are harsh, and typically they’re totally blended, however it’s each of those kinds serving to to form a various, significant panorama.
When DIIV transitioned into their ZIRP! (aka “zero interest-rate coverage”) songs at Cleveland’s The Agora in early October, it felt like being sucked right into a portal and spit out another finish. It was brighter, headier, extra mischievous a few world inundated with, and exhausted by, capitalistic burnout. To be honest, they appeared the half: suited up like hungover stockbrokers coming down from a foul deal. They launched into “The Fountain,” the album’s crackling opening assertion — and a quantum leap. From the onset, torrents of fuzz construct into an ominous whirl, sounding like they may blow the ability any second. It’s noisy with out being drowned out, polished however nonetheless biting. Then there’s the message: The cult of youth is poison. The mind rot feels perennial. Your artwork is simply as invaluable as your open click on charge. With ZIRP!, DIIV urge that there is an alternative choice to the despair. They bottle all of the anxiousness a few deteriorating planet and blow it as much as pop scale.
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Louie Kovatch
At first look, A.G. Cook dinner — the collaborator who’s reshaped pop music and based influential label PC Music — and DIIV hardly appear effectively matched. Cook dinner’s wonky, extraordinarily digital manufacturing type appears at odds with a band whose early albums had been grounded in motorik beat and jammy, cascading riffs. Although 2019’s Deceiver went darker and heavier, the follow-up, 2024’s Frog in Boiling Water, acquired tenser, wading into the horrors of hustle tradition. With Cook dinner, they’ve been liberated, filtering societal collapse via lush, glowing pop songs. Although to not fear: His densely processed enhancing has been swapped for an obsession with the band’s dwell sound, homing in on tracked drums, intricate guitar components, and methodically chosen pedals.
That is what makes their partnership fascinating. For the previous a number of years, pop has been the place different as soon as lived. Children are studying Ableton on YouTube, making songs on their laptops, then importing them to SoundCloud whereas working a day job. Charli’s educating them that an album cycle can outline a season, if it’s intentional sufficient. These pop stars are deconstructing and remaking it on their very own phrases, dwelling in their very own digital fluency. It’s, unquestionably, different.
Maybe that is why DIIV might solely make “Trillions” — a quantity that feels faux to even sort — with Cook dinner, a cheeky pop music that means for those who find it irresistible, you’re instantly in on the bit. Right here, the band lull us into an Auto-Tuned fantasy about becoming a member of the 1%, set to a jangly melody meant for large replay. (They wrote it with Spotify’s “Billions Membership” playlist in thoughts.) “Evangelizer” is all nü-metal bounce and psych trance, mixing a brand new language with a previous one. Elsewhere, the distortion appears like a balm, as on “The Crash,” the place waves of fuzz detonate and recede.
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ZIRP!, as a title, is inherently playful, each Max Headroom futuristic and David Lynch weird. It’s additionally, merely, enjoyable, an aesthetic supercharged with a message. On this timeline, it continues to be a problem for different to imply one thing, however at its baseline, it’s an enthusiasm to interrupt out of molds, resist traits, and stay uncompromising in sound and imaginative and prescient. Streaming favors benign, frictionless bands — those unafraid to get swallowed up by content material metrics as a result of they aren’t actually saying something however would possibly get to play Coachella.
Although different has develop into a lot more durable to categorise, artists of this ilk share a accountability to disrupt the algorithm, to encourage folks to consider and query the world they dwell in, even because the partitions shut in. Who’s this artwork tied to, what’s it for, and the way is it pushing conversations? Then, who deserves your {dollars}? Ideally, that’s somebody who’s created one thing that individuals resonate with and rally round. ZIRP! — and its willingness to champion “The New Different” — does this in spades, however it isn’t a lot about sound as it’s about feeling: of neighborhood, of camaraderie, of leaving one thing higher than you discovered it.
