DIIV Turned Tulips Into A Beautifully Broken Fever Dream

DIIV’s music has always lived in a space where beauty and damage share a lease. On Wednesday night at Tulips in Fort Worth, the Brooklyn band made that tension feel physical. The room didn’t just hear DIIV’s songs. It sat inside them, enveloped by distortion, submerged in mood and nudged along by a show that was as funny, strange and unsettling as it was genuinely moving.

This stop in Fort Worth felt like a return with purpose. After the band’s previous swing through North Texas in support of “Frog in Boiling Water” in 2024, DIIV came back sounding even more locked into the album’s warped emotional weather. On record, that 2024 release plays like a transmission from a world that is burned out, overmediated and still somehow searching for grace. Played live, those ideas became a full environment.

Even before the first proper song, DIIV made it clear this would not be a standard rock set. The band entered to a video clip of Fred Durst introducing them with the exaggerated pomp of a late-night TV announcer. It was absurd and perfect. It also set the tone for an evening that understood the value of undercutting its own mystique. DIIV can be ethereal, but it’s not precious. The band knows how to wink without breaking the spell.

That balance defined the whole performance. Between songs, the band used a stream of corporate-video-style interludes, deadpan ad language and deliberately mundane visual fragments that played like a satire of modern emptiness. At one point, the audio and graphics resembled the kind of lifeless internal training video that tells employees to smile harder and sell more merchandise. Later, the recorded voice turned openly absurd: “All your problems will melt away with a simple purchase of DIIV merchandise.” Another mock-sincere segment thanked “our sponsor, Coinbase Facebook.” The joke landed because DIIV never overplayed it. The band let the bizarre audiovisual filler do its own quiet damage.

More importantly, those interludes solved one of the great practical problems of live music: dead air. While the band retuned and shifted gears, the room never lost momentum. The transitions became part of the art. Instead of the usual pause-and-mumble reset, DIIV made the in-between feel essential, as if the show existed not just in the songs but in the static between them.

Musically, the set was excellent and carefully paced. Opening with “Horsehead,” the band wasted no time establishing that dense, glimmering wall of sound it does so well — part shoegaze cloud bank, part post-punk undertow. “Like Before You Were Born” and “Under the Sun” followed with a sense of lift and drift, dreamy but never soft. DIIV’s gift is that it can sound narcotic and punishing all at once. The guitars shimmer, then scrape. The melodies float, then bruise.

The newer material sat naturally alongside older favorites. “Brown Paper Bag,” “Soul-net” and the title track from “Frog in Boiling Water” all carried a peculiar live power. “Soul-net” in particular gained extra bite in the context of the night’s faux-wellness and pseudo-corporate visuals. A recorded voice in one segment cheerfully insisted, “Capitalism is not the root cause of your personal issues,” then added, “We believe that resistance is not the solution.” The band let that kind of poisoned self-help language hang in the air, then answered it with music that felt human, frayed and defiantly messy.

Onstage, DIIV was magnetic without being theatrical in any conventional sense. Frontman Zachary Cole Smith kept the focus where it belonged: on the songs, the texture and the slow build of tension. He was not hyper-chatty. Near the end, he kept it simple: “Thank you very much,” then, “Thank you to Draag for playing with us tonight.” It was brief, sincere and in keeping with the band’s understated presence.

The movement came from elsewhere. Guitarist Andrew Bailey was impossible to ignore, lurching and jerking around the stage with a kind of loose-limbed ferocity, like a possessed punk kid trapped in a shoegaze band. He played with force and weird charisma, constantly pushing energy outward. Bassist Colin Caulfield, by contrast, was more obscured, often hidden behind a curtain of hair, but no less committed. Together, they gave the music a physical dimension that kept it from becoming merely immersive.

That impact grew as the set moved toward its closing stretch. “Blankenship” brought a familiar jolt. “Doused” arrived like a long exhale from the crowd, its pulse and aching release reminding everyone why it remains one of the band’s most beloved songs. By the time DIIV closed with “Between Tides,” Tulips felt less like a club than a chamber of shared weather — heavy, electric and oddly cleansing.

If DIIV built the night’s strange cathedral, Los Angeles five-piece Draag laid its crooked foundation. Their opening set was short, about 30 minutes, and all the better for its refusal to waste any of them. Draag does not make dream pop in the soft-focus sense. Its music is abrasive, smeared and unpredictable, more like a collage of beautiful wrong turns than a cleanly plotted set of songs.

Working through tracks including “Orb Weaver,” “Miracle Drug,” “Demonbird” and “Recharge,” the band created a kind of organized disorientation. Vocals dissolved into the mix. Rhythms felt as if they might split apart at any moment. Noise and melody kept colliding, then somehow holding. Before one song, a band member asked, “Can I get more vocal here? Because there’s room.” Even that stray bit of stage chatter fit the set’s loose, exploratory spirit. Draag sounded like a band less interested in perfection than in discovery, and the audience benefited from that freedom.

The result was an opener that did more than warm up the room. Draag established the evening’s central mood: weird, searching and gloriously unconcerned with neat edges.

That, in the end, was the triumph of Wednesday night at Tulips. DIIV and Draag offered a show that embraced dissonance in every sense — sonic, emotional and visual — and made it feel coherent. There were moments of absurdity and moments of genuine lift. There was a merch joke delivered like a cult pitch and a set of songs that still managed to feel intimate inside all the irony.

Some bands want to transport you. DIIV did something better. It made Fort Worth feel briefly unmoored, suspended between burnout and transcendence, between the ugly machinery of modern life and the small, stubborn thrill of escaping it for an hour.

DIIV closes out its southwest tour with stops May 7 in Houston and May 8 in Austin. Houston is sold out, but tickets for the Austin show, as part of Austin Psych Fest, are still available through DIIV’s website. Single-day tickets for May 8 are $98.27.