Review: DIIV at The Naval Store

DIIV at the Naval Store
w/ Gia Como
Wednesday, June 4, 2025

In Australia for their first headline tour, Brooklyn-based shoegaze indie-rockers DIIV warmed the hearts and minds of a sold-out audience with a set of swooning emotion and reverb-drenched textures.

In the years since the band first came to our shores for 2016’s Laneway Festival, it seemed that a myriad of interpersonal troubles and battles with drug addiction would sink the DIIV ship, but on stage at the Naval Store, the now four-piece showed that they have not only managed to weather the storm but are in fact stronger and more buoyant than ever.

The group’s current tour comes on the back of their critically acclaimed 2024 album Frog In Boiling Water, their first release in five years, with their appearance in Fremantle one of the drawcards of the city’s inaugural Arrival festival. The festival aims to break the lull that the winter months represent for arts and music, and while the bleak, cold rain outside the venue did try its best to forebode punters, the sold-out crowd in attendance laid testament that the festival’s organisers are on to something.

The festival’s first year saw it focus on music, which it housed in historic venues across Fremantle, such as the Naval Store, PS Art Space and Buffalo Club. For DIIV, the Naval Store was an apt fit, as the former military warehouse’s exposed steel beams and industrial-size chains that hung from rafters left over from yesteryear granted their performance an added gravitas, while the venue’s cavernous space allowed the group’s sonic explorations to develop and reach their full potential.

But before DIIV took the stage, it was local art-pop collective Gia Como that were first to warm up the crowd. With all members dressed in black, the sextet arrived on stage like an apparition. Led by Jack Arbuckle, decked out in a hooded ensemble and sporting a chain-meshed veil, the band ignited an immediate sense of intrigue. While the band’s recordings have a synth-inspired feel and verge towards dream-pop, in the live arena, the group took their sound in a grittier and more guitar-driven direction.

Arbuckle, seated for most of the set, was both a magnetic and mysterious presence throughout, with his deep baritone reverberating throughout the venue. Backed by a tight ensemble, the frontperson proved that Gia Como are more than just studio alchemists as the group boldly set the tone for the night’s headliners.

After a short break, and with the huddled masses now generating their own heat in deference to the cold wintery night outside, DIIV eased into their set with the gently discordant In Amber before unleashing a wall of symphonic noise on Like Before You Were Born, which then quickly segued into the hypnotically slow and steady groove of Frog’s first single Brown Paper Bag.

Across the set the band spent the majority of their time digging from their most recent release, and these songs highlighted the group’s musical evolution. While there was still space for the group’s dreamier, more sundrenched moments, as demonstrated by the bouncing bass and arpeggiated runs of Under The Sun, it was clear where DIIV focused their outlook.

Whereas their collective anxieties previously burdened the group, these have been exorcised and now appear in the group’s output as artistic statements. Like the name of the Frog LP alludes to, the group is all too aware of the danger we live within. But rather than suffer from collapse at these fears, whether it be the inner turmoil that has plagued the band, the late-capitalist fatigue and post-truth era that currently dominates their homeland, or even the climate crisis that reared its head via the Los Angeles bushfires in which frontman Zachary Cole Smith lost his house, they now seek to meditate upon them and, by sharing their concerns, attempt to find connection with others rather than suffer from individual burden.

This sense of meditation was best exemplified on the night by the hauntingly beautiful Everyone Out and the pleaful Reflected. In reference to their country’s current political malaise, doctored infomercials played at points between songs in the set, with the messaging spliced or co-opted via AI to form a sarcastic embrace of capitalism; one video encouraged the purchase of DIIV merch in a sardonic tone, while another featured a computer voice announcing the band’s endorsement of the message as if it were for a political campaign.

The main set ended with the group letting loose and setting sail in the Blankenship, in which the group retreated offstage as a tongue-in-cheek message extolling the virtues of multinational gas giant Exxon played out. The group returned to the stage with the goth-tinged Raining On Your Pillow before diving back into their past for Horsehead, a song that lilts and turns like an untethered keel, and then finally rowing themselves ashore with the rousing Doused as a finale.

In the end, DIIV’s current tour and their performance at the Naval Store wasn’t just a concert; it was a reckoning with the world they find themselves in. Supported by a thrilling set from Gia Como, the night was a testament to the power of live music to confront and comfort. Frog in Boiling Water may be a meditation on collapse, but in Fremantle, DIIV proved that from anxiety and fear, something beautiful can emerge.

MICHAEL HOLLICK

Photos by Chaz Hales