In June of 2025, cultural commentator and meta-artist Brad Troemel released his then latest in a signature of long-form video essays to his Patreon. Curiously titled “The ZIRPSLOP Report”, Troemel argued that the ‘Zero Interest Rate Policy’ enacted by the Federal Reserve around the time of the Obama presidency led to an avalanche of societal and economical devaluation.
So, what is ZIRP? Well, essentially, it argued trickle down economics: the slashing of interest rates sent a signal to wealthy people to invest in ventures – so, upcoming businesses – instead of throwing it at Wall Street or real estate speculations. The idea was that if you invested in a dozen startups, one could hit gold and be the next PayPal, or Uber, or Netflix. Meanwhile, corporate businesses were educated to engage in “blitzscaling”, prioritising growth over profitability. So, fake it ’till you make it: hype up ordinary products as vanguard game changers – sell canned water with tacky metal branding, claim it better than Evian, describe it bombastically as “hydration solution with nurturing minerals”. And, even more importantly: create as much content or product as numerically possibly with the budget you have! And there you have it: pure SLOP!
What followed was a race to the bottom. Startups conceived absurd products, which Troemel has a lot of fun conceiving (“Think of a $400 wifi juicer, a Bluetooth salt shaker, a buy now, pay later plan for bagels”). One product was extended onto a line of dozens, all of them lacklustre. Meanwhile, media degraded to background noise – longevity didn’t matter as much as clicks. If you put a slop-show on while cleaning, and it runs for five hours, a streamer will register that as more worthwhile than investing in a sophisticated show that you watch one or two episodes a time, simply because analytics claim higher numbers. “Startups didn’t raise money to build things, they built narratives to raise money,” Troemel concludes. Meanwhile, all these corporations slowly burned billions.
While the essay continues on, it’s most important to focus on this factor of enshittification – the constant degradation of established appliances, products and media in a means to create engagement. Not a new concept: lightbulbs and nylons used to be so durable, consumers never bought new ones. So, they were made to break easier. In our current day, the experience is almost spiritual: well-designed apps become uglier and harder to perceive, every iPhone has “better” features that actually deliver lesser quality output while the appliance itself glitches more frequently.
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Yes, this is a review of ZIRP!, the new DIIV album! After the excellent Frog in Boiling Water – the band’s most conceptual, political and resonating album to date – DIIV joined forces with A.G. Cook, the brain behind PC Music and, most notably, producer of Charli xcx. It makes sense that, after Cook delivered the best Strokes song in years with Charli’s “Magic Metal Montana”, DIIV would choose somebody this academically interested in the possibilities indie rock provides. After all, their last album kind of established them with a platform of well-groomed shoegaze; something immensely successful which equally could hint towards generic stagnation.
Cook clearly came in hot, crafting a glitzy, almost Y2k palette that references Loveless as much as Black Market Music and Sumday. Take the strangely stuttering guitars of “The Fountain” and compare them to Placebo’s “Spite and Malice”, or play “Kid” right after Grandaddy’s “I’m on Standby”: ZIRP! is very much a record that pays homage to the end of the 90s – the enshittification of alternative, maybe, if you want to go that far. But, obviously, Cook and DIIV hold too much love for these formative records to deride them as slop. They use these progenitors to conceive a somewhat plastic, mega-memorable, hook-laden variant of their signature shoegaze sound.
While a first listen might indicate that the record is a little overtly comfortable with itself, repeat listens quickly reveal some incredible hits. Opener “The Fountain” is a clear favourite, orienting itself on the crossover-obsessed Philly-sound from They Are Gutting A Body Of Water or Full Body 2, with its shimmering cymbals and acid-drenched guitars. “The Crash” uses sinister quasi-Black Sabbath riffs that alternate with slacker vibes: what if Pavement tried to do metal? “Dare Me” features layered, esoteric shoegaze riffs over a sharp breakbeat – a hint of “Waiting” by the Smashing Pumpkins, buried under the crunching guitar landscapes.
“Us Against You” and “Evangelizer” are glorious hymns, both carrying this specific melodic understanding that AIR (ca. The Virgin Suicides OST) were so good at picking up. “My Star” is utterly brilliant in conceptualising an unsettling atmosphere, before suddenly shifting into what almost sounds like Cook’s idea of progressive rock, morphing into a paranoid finish that retains the elegance of Deerhunter or Real Estate. The nervous post-Kraftwerk-Pop of “Trillions” imagines “Autobahn” set in Silverlake.
And then there is closer “Idiot In The Sky” – possibly my favourite on the album: a strangely optimistic, almost futuristic ballad that feels almost lab-created in terms of emotional gravitas. It’s the closest the band has ever gotten to a genuine pop song: with its monotone verse, it could almost have been written for a Taylor Swift alt-turn, which is unlikely to ever happen, but Cook likely perked up and gave the song some additional glam.
So much of ZIRP! is enjoyable on an intuitive level that it could almost seem like nostalgia bait. Often, the record is bordering on the cinematic in how well it conjures these vistas of a bygone era – of the 10 years between 1993 and 2003, its products, its smells.
Thus, we recommend to combine it with our newest scent: bPERFUMEm combines the fruity freshness of the iMac flavours line with freshness of your 17th summer by the sea! Not-yet endorsed by Alex Kent, the scent is sure to rock your minutes! Smell notwithstanding, another strong feature of the album comes in the lyrics of Zachary Cole Smith.
“When the Glow Came for Us” associates the pessimism of societal decline with the grief of the L.A. fires – now indivisibly tied to the dissolution of communities and the death David Lynch, the city’s contemporary chronicler: “The National Guard posted on our block / Burned out cars, the Red Cross / I wait in line for my pamphlet / And tell my song that the glow came for us”.
“Evangelizer” is an optimistic repudiation of contemporary corporatism, with Smith portraying himself as elusive counter-cultural resistance fighter – a little V for Vendetta or Neil Young: “There’s someone in the rooftop, in the trees / Living out somebody else’s Dreams / And maybe even God was born to die / Who judges the judge when it comes his time?” When he mentions his “little red dot”, it’s not an absurd idea that he references a sniper rifle’s laser. “Underground” goes even further and unambiguously calls for revolution: “Bring the hungry to the mall / Liberate the stockroom halls / We’ve found / Something Underground / Build the weapons, wage the war / Oligarchs and overlords / We’ll come out / When they’re under the ground”.
“Idiot in the Sky” is more cosmic, longing for spiritual certainty, but only finding false idols: “Take me to the man in the sky / I wanna hear his idiot cry”. Masterfully, Smith blends religious or esoteric images of hippie ideals into technological appliances and cyborg melancholia: “I wanna be crucified, threat has been neutralised / Interest of enterprise, authority authorised / I got love in my heart, my lungs, silicone / I’m on hold, speakerphone, a beautiful song”.
Many of the songs on ZIRP! are as much about decline and decay as they are about upheaval and resistance. Smith isn’t using shoegaze – or pop – as décor, but understands the genre’s esoteric and emotive qualities as directly related to the euphoric qualities of anger associated with revolutionary action. In these facets, the album almost becomes a vista of possible futures: do we agree with the slop that corporate overlords shovel at us, or do we find new languages to resist?
With each spin, ZIRP! becomes a stronger listen and truly unravels its status as valid shoegaze milestone. Its concepts and qualities are slowly flowering as you embrace the record and meditate on its engaging structures, on Cook’s clever sensibilities, on the many necessary political messages. A less confident analyst would spell these philosophies out, but they have to be left for a younger audience to make sense of and be adapted beyond the album’s confines, onto daily life.
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