DIIV - Frog in Boiling Water
“Frog in Boiling Water is DIIV’s best album… one of the year’s best rock records” – Paste (cover story)
Pitchfork: 50 Most Anticipated Albums of Spring 2024
“the most flat-out beautiful music of DIIV’s career.” – UPROXX
“‘Brown Paper Bag’ finds DIIV gloriously tumbling headfirst into choppy shoegaze currents and somehow staying afloat.” – Under The Radar
“On the lyrics sheet, it’s utterly dark. Yet the soundtrack is a triumphant flex — a complete mastery of a signature sound that reflects back glimpses of so much great music yet sounds like no one but DIIV. It is as if, in giving voice to those feelings in this context, the band has conquered them in real time.” – Stereogum
“a slow, sludgy, but soaring number that recalls the early ’90s where shoegaze and grunge rubbed elbows.” – Brooklyn Vegan
“‘Brown Paper Bag’, is something truly special. Hauntingly beautiful vocals seem to levitate over moments of scorching guitars and trudging drums for a shoegaze-style track with otherworldly textures.” – Glide Magazine
“On ‘Brown Paper Bag’, they’ve never sounded more cutting.” – NME
Four years into making their fourth album, Frog in Boiling Water, the four members of DIIV needed to talk—not later, but now.
The extended process had been uncertain and sometimes grueling, not only pushing them to up their musicianship but also taxing most every resource and bond they had ever cultivated. During the prior decade, DIIV had helped revitalize dream-pop and shoegaze alike, culminating in 2019’s unapologetic genre showcase, Deceiver. But with it, DIIV were now out of contract, proverbial free agents who didn’t owe anything to anyone but themselves—that is, to make a record that challenged them, that pushed their sound beyond any previous parameters.
But after all that collective toil, their relationships with one another were fraying badly inside that singular alchemical state of being a band, where dynamics of family, friendship, and finances become entangled in a Gordian knot. There were suspicions and resentments, bruised egos and anxious questions, all fingerprints left by a quest that demanded DIIV grow both together and apart. So on June 1, 2023, just before they began to mix four years of effort, DIIV—Andrew Bailey, Colin Caulfield, Ben Newman, and Zachary Cole Smith—gathered in Echo Park Lake, the scene of so many halcyon hangs in their early days, under vaguely gray skies to air accumulated grievances. They dropped the shields of professionalism that had let them work amid the rancor and allowed themselves to get mad and bummed, real and vulnerable. Really, it could have broken DIIV before Frog in Boiling Water was finished. (continue reading full bio on DISCO)