Frog In Boiling Water
DIIV
May 24, 2024News updates for 'Frog In Boiling Water' by DIIV
DIIV Release 'Raining On Your Pillow' and final single from forthcoming LP
DIIV have just released “Raining On Your Pillow,” the final single from their forthcoming new album, Frog in Boiling Water, out May 24, 2025 via Fantasy Records. Of the song, the band says “‘Raining on your Pillow’ is a song which brings to mind the shameful past (and present) of American imperialism. Lost in a terrifying landscape, a lone soldier ruminates on the existence of a landscape of his own far removed from conflict. Does it matter if this place is real or not? Is a false sense of hope enough to give our lives meaning in the midst of despair? A looping guitar figure plays underneath a driving rhythm in a cloud of murky atmosphere of analog synths and tape loops. Menacing, doomed, and strangely hopeful.” For the official video, the band collaborated with experimental film directing team, TRLLM (Jak Ritger & K8 Howl) and visionary fine artist, Harry Gould Harvey IV. Together, the group translated the songs themes of military desertion, desire for solace and challenging one’s ideology into an abstract collage of high-speed videography and hand-drawings. Check out the official video below.
Brooklyn shoegazers DIIV, featuring Andrew Bailey, Colin Caulfield, Ben Newman, and Zachary Cole Smith, have just announced their fourth album, Frog in Boiling Water. Produced by Chris Coady and set for release on May 24th via Fantasy Records, Frog In Boiling Water was a four-year process that nearly broke the band before the album was completed. With an aim to push their sound, make a record that challenged them, and treat the band as a democracy for the first time, DIIV began an ambitious journey, both individually and collectively. This journey left their relationships with one another fraying, with the many complex dynamics of family, friendship and finances entangled, coupled with suspicions, resentments, bruised egos and anxious questions. They ultimately found their way through, and the result is 10 songs that mine a new lyrical and musical depth, those two halves mirroring one another inside a reflective and immersive whole. It is a mesmeric testament to enduring, to envisioning anything else on the other side while you remain here, in the slowly heating water of right now.
Frog in Boiling Water, both the title and the themes of the record, reference “The Boiling Frog” in Daniel Quinn’s The Story of B. The band explains, “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.”
Alongside the announcement of Frog in Boiling Water, DIIV shares the album’s lead single “Brown Paper Bag” today which can be streamed below. “Brown Paper Bag” funnels dejection and angst into an exquisite intersection of dream-pop and post-rock, a wispy tune stretching from a steely foundation.
