Chasing Fridays: DIIV, Fine, Bassvictim, more

A few things of note before getting into this week's Chasing Fridays:

1) I reviewed the new Chat Pile album for Pitchfork. Chat Pile are a band I never really cared for, but after spending a lot of time digesting their latest offering – especially its lyrics – I came to appreciate the band's singular form of sludgy noise-rock. Check out the review if you're curious to know more.

2) If you read me for my takes on metalcore, deathcore, and hardcore, then you should also subscribe to my friend Shaye's Substack The Genre Jaunt. He's one of the only other writers covering those styles with a careful blend of curiosity and skepticism, and his latest dispatch about the Myspace deathcore revival's creative bankruptcy is a crucial read.

3) Two friends of the blog, Andrew Sacher and Steven Hyden, released new books this week. Andrew's "Emo Revival" book is a crucial deep dive into how emo, post-hardcore, and punk changed forever between 2008 and 2018. Steven's latest book, "Is This It," is about The Strokes, a band I like thinking and reading about more than listening to. Both are great reads and you should buy them!

4) You should also pre-order my shoegaze book, "When the Sun Hits: The High-Volume History of Shoegaze." I think it's good and the more people who pre-order it, the more likely it is to get stocked in local stores all throughout the world :-)

And now for this week's Chasing Fridays. Without getting too into it, I had a pretty tumultuous and busy summer, and for reasons outside of my control, my attention was pulled away from discovering and digesting new music at my typically prolific rate. This week was the first newsletter in a little while where I really felt like I got my mojo back. I went in on the new DIIV singles, the new Fine song, the new Bassvictim loosie, and new tracks from A Country Western and Interlay. There's no Q&A this week, but I think the range of music criticism below will surely make up for that.

DIIV are ZIRPing us

I think what's important to keep in mind about these new DIIV singles is that DIIV have never been stagnant. They've never been easily classifiable. They've only sometimes been shoegaze. But they've always liked fucking with people. For the rollout of ZIRP!, the Brooklyn band's new album produced by PC Music's A.G. Cook, DIIV are having fun fucking with us.

The record's promotional materials are slapped with the salable mantra, "This Is the New Alternative: A New Genre for the 21st Century." In all the accompanying press photos, DIIV – a band who've always had ties to the fashion world and have never had any trouble looking cool – are dressed like frumpy finance bros. The hand binocular pose that guitarist Andrew Bailey strikes in the below photo, right next to drummer Ben Newman's glaringly bald head glowing above his suspender straps, makes me chuckle every time I see it because it's so fucking tacky. DIIV are underratedly hysterical. They're play-acting the role of the aging indie band trying desperately to appear chicly quirky. This is DIIV at their most ZIRP'd up.

DIIV are funny, but they're not a joke band. They've come a long way from being the trendy young whippersnappers running around Brooklyn with a dark, druggy cloud hanging over their heads. On 2019's Deceiver, they evolved beyond the taut, murky post-punk of their first two records and fashioned themselves into a proper shoegaze band right when heavy, somber shoegaze of that variety was taking off. The record's slow-burning cult status allowed DIIV to make it to the other side of COVID-19 without feeling like a dusty relic of the Captured Tracks goldrush, and though they crept beyond shoegaze on 2024's softer, slower Frog In Boiling Water, they culturally embraced the new generation of 'gazers who heralded them as elder statesman, taking TAGABOW, Glixen, Trauma Ray, and Full Body 2 on tour that summer.

Perhaps even more pertinent to their arc than the album's music was DIIV adopting a pointedly political bent while still working within a genre (shoegaze) that's historically a-conceptual. Frog In Boiling Water was a fully earnest critique of late-capitalist chaos that DIIV promoted with a series of playfully oblique stunts: a fake SNL performance, pretending their Instagram got hacked by a spammy wellness cult, creating a conspiracy-laden website that fans had to trawl through to hear new songs. Content-wise, Frog... was as sincere and thoughtful a record as DIIV had always written, but their presentation toyed with tension in a way they never had. With ZIRP!, DIIV are taking that schtick a step further and making it genuinely difficult to discern between sincerity and satire.

On the one hand, DIIV are trumpeting these new songs as being beacons of a fresh genre, a New Alternative to the old Alternative that DIIV's 90s-shaded guitar music has always been chained to. With A.G. Cook – undoubtedly one of the most un-retro electronic producers of the 21st century – behind the boards, DIIV are signaling that ZIRP! is an elaborate attempt at radical genre-busting. At making something decidedly new and previously unheard of. On the other hand, the first couple ZIRP! singles, "The Fountain" and "Kid," basically just sound like DIIV songs. "The Fountain" is a glitched-out shoegaze tune that doesn't pose a very substantial threat to the genre's form: cascading fuzz, elastic glide-guitar bends, murmuring vocals – all the accoutrements of the genre DIIV claim to be subverting.

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"Kid" is a little different in that it's not a straight-up shoegaze song, but rather a muted and minimalist indie bop that could've been plucked from any Alex G album from the last 10 years. Singer Cole Smith's vocals are slightly more prominent in the mix than usual, but not any stylistically different, and the electronic drum sample that putters in the background of the first two verses ultimately has a pretty negligible presence within the final composition. The track's climax isn't some sort of PC Music-ian electronic swerve, but a pleasantly familiar crackle of shoegaze distortion. "It all comes back to you somehow," Smith sings above the dissonance with a strained whimper.

What I'm having trouble deciding is just how in on the bit DIIV are with this stuff. The press release for "The Fountain" touts that ZIRP!'s New Alternative sound is optimized for the "VC-funded super deluxe remixed AI-enhanced algorithmically perfected wild west" where popular music competes in the 2020s. An album in which DIIV answer, as the press release states, "the simple questions that so many bands can’t: What would it mean to grow up? And glow up, too?" This is obviously facetious gibberish that's parodying the Polymarket-brained vernacular that's captured our cultural economy, but does that mean the music's a send-up as well?

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Considering the future-facing producer DIIV hired and the language they're using to promote this record, "The Fountain" and "Kid" sound remarkably – maybe even disappointingly, despite being perfectly serviceable DIIV songs – like the Old Alternative. DIIV are smart fellas. I think they're fully aware that the notion of smashing genre taxonomies and embracing "genre-lessness" has become its own commodified taxonomy in the 2020s. I bristle against artists who are framed as being "beyond genre" because so much of that language is transparently a marketing tactic – the music industry equivalent to being called an "interrupter" in the stock economy.

I could be wrong, and maybe the rest of ZIRP! will change my mind, but my hunch is that DIIV are thinking about all of this. That they know there's a disparity between the way they're describing their new music and the way it actually sounds. That all of these contradictions are part of a greater story that DIIV are telling with this album. I think we're all about to get ZIRP'd.

Fine - "Everything in the shade"

Last summer, I became obsessed with Copenhagen singer-songwriter Fine while I was constructing my cloud-rock thesis. At the time, I considered her music to be emblematic of that emerging strain of outré pop: faint, anemic, oneirically hazy, digitally mutated but not qualitatively electronic. After spending a full year trying to trace cloud-rock's increasingly – and inherently – foggy contours, I'm not so sure that Fine actually belongs under that sonic skyline. In some cases, particularly the songs "I could" and "Run," her music certainly bears cloud-rock's misty markings. The rhythmic underpinnings of those songs have an ectoplasmic viscosity that causes them to wobble like Jell-o, sounding at once uncannily abstract and acutely tangible.

However, many of her other tracks, such as the devastatingly pretty "Losing Tennessee," and also her latest tune, "Everything in shade," basically sound like if Mazzy Star came up on Lana Del Rey rather than vice versa. ​The lovelorn piano ballad is classic Laurel Canyon psych-folk, wistfully weathered and wearily sweet, but cast through a dingey layer of 21st century resignation that time stamps it to the present. Otherwise, there aren't any actual sonic choices that make "Everything in the shade" sound modern in the way that "Run" – with its seamless cityscape samples – and "Days Incomplete" – with its DAW-designed trip-hop loops – squarely do. That's not a criticism. "Everything in the shade" may not inhabit the cutting edge of internet-native indie, but Fine is the only artist from this cloudy coterie whose voice is guaranteed to make tears rain down from overcast eyes.

Bassvictim - "Jagódki (Blueberries)"

This is the first Bassvictim song in a long while that I feel meh about. Since the top of 2025, the indietronic psych assailants have been assembling a shanty town of unrelated sub-genres – crystalline hyperclash, saucer-eyed freak-folk, drug-dusted laptop twee – that they've consistently added a new hutch to every six months. The streams insinuate that their fans are partial to their Basspunky beginnings, but I think the duo really came into their own with the wook-coded indie-pop romps on last year's Forever and this year's ? EP, which both contain some of the most thrillingly nutty art-pop this side of 1000 gecs.

Bassvictim are at their best when they're just barely retaining control of their own chaos, and they unfortunately lose their grip on "Jagódki (Blueberries)." The loosie is of a piece with the cartoonish neo-psych tip that they've been on lately – a mélange of M.I.A., Animal Collective, and Crest-era Bladee – but it sounds more jumbled than it does joyfully demented. Maria Manow's pitchy yelps are lazily indifferent to the rhythm of Ike Clateman's beat, which is littered with boing-boing effects and stuttering saw waves that feel, for the first time, that he's rehashing rather than remixing his pool of influences. The individual pieces are there, but "Jagódki (Blueberries)" never ends up building to – or smashing apart – the sort of glorious payoff that Bassvictim evangelists have come to expect from them.

A Country Western - "Blood Eagle"

A Country Western have had an interesting trajectory. The Philly band started out the decade making durable Duster worship shortly before that sound wore out its welcome, and then they shrewdly pivoted to breakcore-boosted shoegaze on their 2022 split with They Are Gutting a Body of Water. It seemed that A Country Western were about to go all in on the JWAR brand of scuzz-scarred shoegaze, but they flipped the script yet again with 2024's Life on the Lawn LP, a surprisingly sturdy – and un-gazey – slacker-rock record. Two years onward, ACW have more or less stayed put. "Blood Eagle," the first single from a new LP, is a slim, Ovlov-ian fuzz-rocker with the type of buried hook that people can mutter into their beer cans without having to lift their lips off the rim. This is a style of brown-bag-in-a-basement indie that never goes out of fashion.

Interlay - "Silo"

The Chicago band Interlay intrigued me a couple years ago by sounding like early Mannequin Pussy, playing with contemporary nu-gaze bands, and dressing their cover art up in black-metal iconography. In 2026, their gothic grunge-gaze resembles the nexus of all those things, which means their new single "Silo" is a worthy listen if you like your shoegaze drab, dramatic, and just different enough from the scourge of heavy-gaze that's held the genre hostage for most of this decade. Interlay covered a Deftones song a couple years back, but thankfully they don't sound anything like that band on "Silo." It really does remind me of a Mannequin Pussy track like "Romantic" by way of Siouxsie and the Banshees, which is to say creepy, pained, and sufficiently powerful.