Five years after the release of Deceiver, DIIV have announced their fourth album, Frog in Boiling Water. Produced by Chris Coady and set for release on May 24 via Fantasy Records, the LP was reportedly a four-year process that nearly broke the band before the album was completed. The project’s first single “Brown Paper Bag” is a snarling alt-rock cut that takes cues from ’90s shoegaze and the sludgy beauty of bands like Audioslave and Smashing Pumpkins.
Both the title and the themes of the new record reference “The Boiling Frog” in Daniel Quinn’s The Story of B. The band explained, “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.” Cheery stuff here.
The band added: “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.”
Speaking of end-stage capitalism, get a jump on consuming their product by pre-ordering Frog in Boiling Water here. You can check out “Brown Paper Bag” below.
