About DIIV
DIIV is an American rock band from Brooklyn, New York City, formed in 2011. The band consists of Zachary Cole Smith , Andrew Bailey , Colin Caulfield and Ben Newman .
Initially called Dive, the band started as Smith's solo recording project. After releasing three singles—"Sometime", "Human" and "Geist"—on Captured Tracks, DIIV released its debut studio album, Oshin, on June 26, 2012.
In 2016, the band released its second studio album, Is the Is Are, after a lengthy and troubled creation. On October 4, 2019, DIIV's third album, Deceiver, was released on Captured Tracks. On May 24, 2024, DIIV released their fourth album, Frog in Boiling Water, to critical acclaim.
After a few years playing guitar with the psych-rock band Soft Black and playing drums for Beach Fossils, Zachary Cole Smith formed DIIV in 2011 as a forum for his own songs. He enlisted childhood friend Andrew Bailey on guitar, bassist Devin Ruben Perez , and ex-Smith Westerns drummer Colby Hewitt as his live band. Smith, who originally named the project "Dive" after the Nirvana song of the same name, explained to Pitchfork that "everybody in the band is a water sign, that's kind of why the name Dive really spoke to us all." Smith would eventually change the spelling of the band's name after learning of the early 1990s Belgian industrial act by that name.
Captured Tracks signed the band and released two singles, "Sometime" and "Human", which were recorded solely by Smith and had acted as demos. In May 2012, the band changed their name to DIIV, according to Smith, "out of respect for Dirk Ivens and the original Dive," a 1990s Belgian industrial group. "We’ve not been contacted by Dirk Ivens or his lawyers," Smith said in a press release, "but the short of it is that I don’t really give a fuck what the band is called." He continued, "I originated this project in a bedroom with no internet and didn’t know if it would ever leave the bedroom. 'DIVE', the word, was an element of what inspired the project in its genesis, but we’ve outgrown the name and its associations. The band is the same, the music is the same, the future will always be the same. A name is nothing."
DIIV's debut album, Oshin, was released on June 26, 2012. It was preceded by the single "Geist" in April 2012 and the music video for "How Long Have You Known" in May 2012. The songs on Oshin were influenced by krautrock, C86 bands, Nirvana and world music. "People didn’t seem to pick up on the influence of these Malian guitar players, especially Baba Salah whose record I got at the library," Smith said. "He's a huge star in Mali, but he has this one record called Borey and it was huge for me and influenced the way I experimented with melody."
DIIV supported English band The Vaccines on their UK tour during November 2012. DIIV also supported the Canadian duo Japandroids on their East Coast US tour in November–December 2012.
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