DIIV bring their A. G. Cook record back to The Orange Peel

Three and a half years after their last Asheville show, DIIV return to the same Biltmore Avenue room on April 22, 2027, with ZIRP!, their most divisive album yet.

The last time DIIV played Asheville, it was Oct. 16, 2023, at The Orange Peel. They hadn't released Frog in Boiling Water yet, and nobody was talking about A. G. Cook. The band comes back to the same room on Thursday, April 22, 2027, at 8 p.m., with a new album that has split the people who love them. Tickets are through eTix.

A lot has happened in between. In 2024 DIIV released Frog in Boiling Water, their first album since 2019's Deceiver, and toured North America behind it that summer, as The Fader reported at the time. That's the cycle that included the "Brown Paper Bag" video with Fred Durst. Then, last week, came the bigger swing.

ZIRP!, DIIV's fifth album, arrived Oct. 30 on Fantasy Recordings, and it was produced by A. G. Cook. The band previewed it all fall: lead single "The Fountain", then "Kid" in early September, then "Trillions" on Oct. 2. The "Trillions" video, directed by Jaxon Whittington, plays like an exaggerated fantasy of wealth, success and excess. mxdwn said the band were leaning further into their pop instincts.

Not everyone is sold. Stereogum found "Trillions" maybe slightly less sincere than what came before. The Line of Best Fit's review framed the album as DIIV confronting social turmoil with more simplicity, but called the Cook partnership still not wholly convincing. A record that sounds this little like the DIIV people know is a big bet for a band whose live show has always been about volume and drift.

A record that sounds this little like the DIIV people know is a big bet.

That's what makes an April show at The Orange Peel interesting. By then the album will be six months old, the singles will have settled in, and the band will have had a winter to work out how the Cook songs live next to the older material. The Orange Peel holds 1,050, which is about right for a band that can fill a room on reputation but is asking its audience to follow it somewhere new.

DIIV spent part of this fall supporting Interpol on select North American dates and played Los Angeles' Shrine Expo Hall with Basement on Oct. 20. The 2027 dates are the first real chance to see how ZIRP! holds up as a headline set. The listing is on JamBase, and the band's label page is at Fantasy Recordings.

The people who were at the Orange Peel in 2023 saw a band right before a reinvention. On April 22 they get to see what came out the other side. It's a Thursday, and it's worth taking Friday morning slow.

Sources: Stereogum: DIIV - Trillions (stereogum.com); Stereogum: DIIV - The Fountain (prod. A. G. Cook) (stereogum.com); The Needle Drop: DIIV share Kid from ZIRP! (theneedledrop.com); mxdwn: DIIV shares new single and video Trillions (music.mxdwn.com); The Line of Best Fit: DIIV confront social turmoil with more simplicity on ZIRP! (thelineofbestfit.com); The Fader: DIIV share 2024 tour dates, video featuring Fred Durst (thefader.com); Fantasy Recordings: DIIV announce world tour (fantasyrecordings.com); eTix tickets (etix.prf.hn); JamBase listing (jambase.com)