Diiv's Cole Smith drops 'Zirp' after losing Altadena home
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- Zachary Cole Smith is promoting Diiv's new album 'Zirp!' (meaning "zero interest-rate policy"), produced by Alex "AG" Cook, the neon pop accelerationist and Charli xcx collaborator.
- Smith coined a tongue-in-cheek genre he calls the "New Alternative," invoking Thatcher's "there is no alternative" slogan and Mark Fisher's Capitalist Realism, and called publicly for Spotify to be "dismantled" in favor of a publicly owned streaming library.
- The January 2025 Eaton Canyon wildfire destroyed Smith's Altadena home while his wife was seven months pregnant; the family received $100,000 in crowdfunded aid from their community, which Smith called "the most meaningful thing that's ever happened to me, on an interpersonal level."
- Smith got sober in 2017 after a 2013 arrest for heroin and ecstasy possession with then-girlfriend Sky Ferreira, and subsequently democratized Diiv's creative process after years of single-handedly producing and masterminding the band's first two records.
- New songs on 'Zirp!' include "Evangelizer," depicting "BlackRock master keys" and "Palantir-Pfizer collab pills" in a "post-capitalist hellscape," and "The Crash," a narrator who vows to "throw the billionaires screaming in an alligator pit."
Why it matters: Smith's anti-capitalist turn — naming BlackRock, Palantir, Pfizer, and Spotify by name — is unusual for a shoegaze band of Diiv's stature, and the $100,000 crowdfunded fire aid shows the community infrastructure that indie musicians have built outside streaming platforms he now wants dismantled.
