DIIV’s fourth album Frog in Boiling Water is a study on existence, and who better to conduct it than a band that almost didn’t survive.
The second DIIV album to feature the now-established line-up of vocalist and guitarist Zachary Cole Smith, guitarist Andrew Bailey, bassist Colin Caulfield and drummer Ben Newman, it’s their first release on the famed Fantasy Records. Having released three albums on Captured Tracks: Oshin, Is the Is Are, and Deceiver, Frog in Boiling Water is an album that almost didn’t make it.
Following the release of Deceiver in 2019, and particularly during the disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic, the band struggled to recreate the magic of their most recent record. And yet, in 2022, they decamped to a rented home in the Mojave with a bundle of guitars, recording gear, and books about humanity’s failures, psychological warfare, and Zen poetry.
Their efforts during this time were so taxing that Caulfield earned himself a case of nicotine poisoning. Still, the bandmates hoped to finish the bulk of the record there, to capture a room sound that felt “ineffable”. But stress mounted as they struggled to solidify what their fourth album could be, to funnel their individual passions into a collective whole that also said something about that time. So, they headed home without a record.
Tensions grew, and it wasn’t until a clear-the-air meeting at Echo Park Lake in 2023 that DIIV found a reason to go on.
The result is Frog in Boiling Water, an album whose title references Daniel Quinn’s 1996 novel The Story of B, which Diiv explained to Pitchfork as: “If you drop a frog in a pot of boiling water, it will of course frantically try to clamber out. But if you place it gently in a pot of tepid water and turn the heat on low, the frog will sink into a tranquil stupor, exactly like one of us in a hot bath, and before long, with a smile on its face, it will unresistingly allow itself to be boiled to death.”
We understand the metaphor to be one about a slow, sick, and overwhelmingly banal collapse of society under end-stage capitalism, the brutal realities we’ve maybe come to accept as normal. That’s the boiling water and we are the frogs. The album is more or less a collection of snapshots from various angles of our modern condition which we think highlights what this collapse looks like and, more particularly, what it feels like.”
Frog in Boiling Water is a glorious, haunted record, as DIIV gaze into our collective oblivion to articulate a trace of hope inside that enveloping gloom. Balancing rhythms first built from breakbeats and inspired by post-industrial power with billowing guitars and vocals, it is mighty but breezy, greyscale but opalescent.
Opener “In Amber” offers an internal existential debate about slipping out of this world, of shaking off its turmoil. The downtrodden guitars of Smith and Bailey perfectly paint this feeling for the first half before lifting together toward the end in an act of resistance against abject despair. “Brown Paper Bag”, the first single off the album, funnels dejection and angst into an exquisite intersection of dream-pop and post-rock, a wispy tune stretching from a steely foundation.
On another single, Newman and Caulfield conjure a warped and muted funk inside the rhythm section of “Soul-Net”, a prime canvas for Smith’s character study about those who have found meaning in a vacuous life through online conspiracy theories. They ride this haze to the closing track “Fender on the Freeway” where Smith sings: “You can’t unring a bell, we live in heaven, and we live in hell.”
And there, in the lyrics of the final track, lies the contrast that every song on Frog in Boiling Water frames so well — the darkness of these days, and an appreciation of existence itself.
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G.M
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