AirPods turning music down by themselves

I recently got a new pair of AirPod 4s. Whenever I’m listening to music they will seemingly at random completely dull the music to the point where I can’t hear it, but it continues to play, so I just have to turn the volume up or down by one notch and it returns to where it was before.

This didn’t happen on my last pair of AirPod 4s - I only stopped using those cause the left one got ran over by a car and a family member had a spare new set of the 4s

My phone is still running iOS 17, I really don’t care about Spatial Audio or any of the “features”. Just would like a fix to them turning the volume to 0 by themselves.

Thanks.