DIIV / Bdrmm live review: a full circle moment

Posted On March 15, 2024March 15, 2024

As one of the most influential guitar bands of the past decade, DIIV have more right than most to take time between records. Despite forming in 2011, they’ve released only three studio albums to date. Without getting into the well-publicised reasons for this, there can be no doubt that each album has built on the strides of the previous one. So, fans were rightly excited when they announced Frog in Boiling Water in February, the long-awaited follow-up to 2019’s Deceiver.

This, in addition to the fact that lead single ‘Brown Paper Bag’ and the ensuing ‘Soul-Net’ hit all the right spots, has only heightened the eager sentiments. Unfortunately, the record doesn’t arrive until May 24th, but the band have already begun to tour, giving a taste of what’s to come. 

On March 12th, they did so with verve at O2 Forum Kentish Town, as they asserted just how expansive their metamorphosis is, with a more pertinent essence than ever. Fittingly undertaken in a city where they have always resonated, the crowd willing lapped them up. They were supported by one of their most exciting sonic disciples, Bdrmm. It was a night of utter triumph for everybody involved.

In what was a full circle moment for the Hull shoegaze favourites Bdrmm, their support slot for DIIV seemed to be a natural part of an arc that’s seen them segue from being the champions of the verdant Yorkshire scene into an act with international pull, occupying a space that is their own. For the group headed by frontman/guitarist Ryan Smith and his brother, bassist/synth whizz Jordan, the evening was a perfect means of asserting how far they’ve come from playing drug-fuelled basement shows littered with wasted students. Put it this way: Jordan was just a kid, not yet out of compulsory secondary education when they started. Now, he’s near enough an accomplished luminary.

While the band have many different influences, DIIV was an instrumental force for Bdrmm’s frontman when he was getting the project off the ground and out of the bedroom where he conceived it. Flecks of the ‘Doused’ group can be heard in their early material, which not only made good on the blueprint established by Zachary Cole Smith but also reinvented it. This demonstrates how profoundly DIIV pierced the cultural fabric for a generation.

Of course, since the days of ‘Happy’, Bdrmm have continued on their path, refining their character and tapping into electronic, jazz, ambient and other forms to offer a more distilled version of themselves as musicians and, indeed, people. Yeah, they might have supported label bosses Mogwai at Alexandra Palace and other sprawling European venues, but this night was special in a different way.

So, as the Smiths, guitarist Joe Vickers and drummer Conor Murray took to the stage at the Forum, it was a jubilant affair. Demonstrating their range as an outfit, they played cuts from across their story, which included ‘It’s Just a Bit of Blood’, ‘Standard Tuning’, and their penultimate offering for the evening, ‘Happy’. It’s a track spiritually indebted to the atmospheric conjurings of DIIV on Oshin and Is The Is Are. Everything fell into place without a hitch.

With the audience warmed up, the beer flowing, and pre-show cigarettes huffed outside, DIIV took to the stage. Opening with ‘Like Before You Were Born’ from their last album, the band was received as if they were returning heroes.

For the first couple of tracks, the levels were a bit out of balance, perhaps owing to the quick turnaround between acts, with the bass and guitars lower in the mix than they ought to be. However, this was soon rectified, and by their third song, ‘Brown Paper Bag’, things were as they should have been. In reality, no one gave a damn, as the tracks were performed with vitality. The swells of the guitars in the opener and the heady chimes of ‘Under the Sun’ prompting total immersion.

Musically, DIIV were on heat. It’s always in the live setting where you fully understand how accomplished a band are as a unit and individually. They worked in tandem the whole set, performing in their usual flow states, absolutely giving it in the heavier moments and chilling it in the more reflective ones.

As Frog in Boiling Water is the most explicitly political stop in the group’s career that not only debates the state of the post-truth world but lampoons how ridiculous things have become, it makes sense that DIIV should look to bolster this angle visually. Alongside creating a fake SNL appearance featuring Fred Durst for the video for ‘Brown Paper Bag’, they’ve also created the unsettling but comical website Soul-net, which, if you can make sense of it, speaks to the overall message of the new record.

Consequently, the group’s show was augmented by the almost stage-wide visualisers. The pure but menacing dystopian red of their latest album cover, the strange AI renditions of themselves, as well as the employees of the fake company Soul Net, who tell us in the video for the lead single that “capitalism is not the root cause of your personal issues”.

All of this worked together to confirm that the new batch of tracks isn’t just music: It’s something much more significant that demands genuine participation. That’s the essence of being an artist in the postmodern era, where lines are blurred, and the traditional definition of a group is subverted.

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