DIIV on “Frog in Boiling Water”
A River to Scrap Away On
by Jasper Willems
Almost to a fault, DIIV keep finding themselves in volatile waters. They plunged into the scene as a flagship act for influential imprint Captured Tracks. The lush dream pop mantras of debut LP Oshin, the band floated downstream with a breezy cool that would define indie fashion for decades to come. The currents, however became too strong, and DIIV got caught up in many of rock ’n’ roll’s inherent pitfalls: myth-building outgrowing individuals that built said myth, addled by substance abuse, tabloid drama, infighting. Somehow, frontman Zachary Cole Smith possessed the talent and wherewithal to funnel all that into 2016’s Is this The Are, the landmark album where DIIV’s signature sound mutated beyond skin-deep aesthetics, and expanded into a potent vehicle to express personal troubles.
Three years later, on 2019’s Deceiver, DIIV reinvented themselves as a requisite working band: four captains running a tighter ship and injecting grittier, more textural sonics into their reverb-drenched glissades. The album still became a sober reckoning with the past, and more specifically, Smith’s long and distressing road to sobriety. He himself admits as much: up till now, DIIV haven’t been able fully to control their own destiny, and completely untether their creative output from their inner turmoil. With their run for Captured Tracks coming to an end, this year, DIIV released their fourth album Frog in Boiling Water on Fantasy Records last May.
Free from the burdens of being the it-band, DIIV have shed the starry-eyed, naive nostalgia of Oshin. More than ever, they are a group primed to paint a blank canvas to their very liking. “I feel like after getting through all that we kind of earned the ability to look outside of ourselves,” Smith observes. The image of a frog slowly getting cooked in boiling water, however, offers a rather defeatist predicament. This time, the antagonists in question aren’t addiction and personal demons: Frog in Boiling Water is DIIV’s thousand yard stare into the outside world, addressing the systems of oppression we’re bound to, scrapping for glints of hope and reprieve in the age of late-stage capitalism.
Many stirring questions emerged. Like for instance, how does the venture of being band a decade into a celebrated — and occasionally troubled — career fit into all of this? Moving apathetically along with the currents and meditating on what Smith calls “Jenny Holzer truisms” seemed like a cul de sac. To have something new to say, DIIV would have to turn the wheel and court strife — by now a familiar friend — yet again.
“Being in a band is hard,” Smith underscores. “There are so many things tied into it. We’re all friends who have known each other for over a decade. It’s our job, and [being a musician] is a difficult financial path to take. It’s our creative output and personal expression — all these heavily weighted things combined. The decisions we make can feel like they’re carrying a lot of weight. I’m sure every band deals with that, and part of that is the nature of being a band. But the four of us are really opinionated people, not to mention really different from each other. And the difficult interpersonal stuff is the first thing I thought about when I was making Frog in Boiling Water. And yeah, DIIV has had multiple occasions when the band was pretty much falling apart. Making this album wasn’t a circumstance where that was happening. Tensions have been as high or higher than they’ve ever been, but more out of a belief in the record.”
“After we finished the album and went through a period of difficulty and hashed things out, it felt so stressful and unique to us in the moment,” bassist Colin Caulfield interjects. “But there was a time when I realized ‘Oh, most bands break up way before the 10-year mark’. It makes sense that it’s so hard. I was able to give us as a band a lot more grace because of that, to work through these difficult periods. It’s kind of miraculous that DIIV are still a band after 12, 13 years.”
Smith remarks that in the creation of these songs, DIIV learned the hard way on how to communicate in an unfettered way, without it spilling over to the personal dynamics. Fortunately, they had plenty of time to work out these kinks during the tail end of the pandemic. In a rented lot in Mojave, the quartet worked 13 days straight for 10 days, which should have been ample time to finish the album. To no avail: the creative stalemate between these four headstrong musicians remained.
Half a year later, perspective shifted. Smith became a father for the first time, and the band appointed producer Chris Coady (Beach House, Blonde Redhead) as an important arbiter — not just on what DIIV’s music could sound like in the near-future, but their entire hierarchy as a band. On June 1st, 2023, the four musicians reconvened: not armed with instruments and literature, but just themselves and the grievances simmering beneath. No punches were pulled during the making of Frog in Boiling Water.
“We have to have these hard talks like all the time,” drummer Ben Newman adds. “Because there’s always new stuff coming up. The reason why it felt like a transitional moment, was because we were so focussed on the making of this record, that we didn’t take the time to talk about our feelings. It caused a lot of build-up.” Caulfield: “It definitely felt like a first in terms of how healthy the communication was. It felt like a paradigm shift of being honest and communicating without things turning resentful or aggressive.”
“The most important thing is that in the end, we all have the same goals,” guitar player Andrew Bailey, the band’s matter-of-fact realist, soberly states. “These talks aren’t there to convince someone to give up their goal in favor of someone else’s goal. It’s more like — as we grow and change as people — we have to take a closer look at how we interact to achieve those goals, because that’s where we usually disagree. Which is, relatively speaking, easy, because you have to do that with every long-term relationship.”
A stadium tour opening up for Depeche Mode in 2023 shook all members of DIIV out of their systems in a — mostly — positive way. It may seem like an odd match, stylistically speaking, but by watching a legendary band up close, Smith was triggered by epiphanies on how his own band could evolve as a live act down the line. “Depeche Mode are doing theater, you know?,” he comments. “They are performing as characters on stage, and it’s so cool and special. I think when you’re a band like us coming from these small punk spaces — there’s a level of authenticity that’s so essential to places like that. We’re just a bunch of people making music alongside the biggest shows, which are like full theater. DIIV are in this interesting transition in-between right now, arriving at a certain point…”
Smith cuts off his original thought for a more intrusive one. “I was talking to George Clarke of Deafheaven about that: he talked about taking a step out of the punk authenticity-thing into more character building on stage. It’s interesting to think about where to draw the line. We’ve leaned into our show becoming more a theatrical, immersive performance and less of a ‘Hey how’s everybody doing?’ kind of thing. But again, it is hard to know where the line is drawn, because we exist in this in-between space where people expect the authentic rock thing with just us as four guys on stage. Others are maybe looking for a more immersive multimedia experience.”
Which has been another first for DIIV as an independent act exempted from major label expectations: cracking their skulls together to create a compelling visual extension of thematics of Frog in Boiling Water. A lot of it was informed by Smith feeling more compelled to write from the perspective of various characters, a gradual shift away from the more autobiographical songwriting direction honed in the past. “In wanting to make a political record, Cole using characters is a way to avoid being too preachy,” Caulfield observes, on his bandmates’ expanding songwriting approach. “It doesn’t try hitting your head with ‘the truth’, and ultimately brings maybe a more emotional reaction in addition to an intellectual reaction, while keeping it ambiguous enough to keep it open for interpretation.”
The sinister, mid-tempo “Soul-net” — initially released on a mock Web 1.0-stylised website — is DIIV’s first concentrated attempt to expand their lingo beyond the fundamental ‘four dudes in a band’-blueprint. “The idea for the website came from the song, which is a character study of someone losing their mind on the internet,” Smith reveals. “He finds some kind of explanation for life being bad, one that exists outside of the real problems. Capitalism is probably at the root of his problems, but he is looking elsewhere for meaning. I thought it was an interesting paradox: where you kind of find yourself and lose yourself at the same time. It felt rooted in these Web 1.0 word salad-sites full of conspiracy theories. At the time, we didn’t have a record label, and we weren’t really trying to put out a single. So it felt like putting up a barrier between the song and the listener. Instead of saying ‘Please listen to this!’, creating a little bit of an experience. So we threw a lot of ideas at the thing.It was a lot of fun…we never had that much fun putting out music, you know?”
The reactions to the “Soul-net” rollout were entertainingly diverse: some fans even believed the DIIV socials had been hacked. Bailey calls the website more an “alternate reality” than some kind of hub tin foil hat-wearing crackpots. “The album shows us snapshots of people growing up with capitalism. There is a specific type of person who feels this reality doesn’t work, without any good explanation. And then somebody else is like ‘All of this isn’t real’. It’s sort of the two-plus-two-equals-five, Dostoyevsky saying ‘your world, your reality doesn’t work for me’ and playing with that idea.”
On Deceiver DIIV mined a lot of nostalgic sounds from bands like Jesu, Duster and Sonic Youth, and on Frog In Boiling Water the band made a more brooding, slow-paced record, where Smith’s character studies are in constant dialogue with the torrential layers of sound. Songs sound more like weather currents to get completely lost in. “I think you’re on the right track of thinking that music sounds and feels is a response to what the songs are about and vice versa. The songs being slower allows for the lyrics to be more brooding, and introspective and political. There’s like this feedback loop that happens,” Caulfield acknowledges, responding to a question on the more widescreen approach of Frog in Boiling Water. These songs have a weight and a toil to them, something that once felt anathema for a band who perpetually filtered a cool ennui through their spry songwriting.
As a more politically-charged DIIV record, Frog in Boiling Water hasn’t manifested in rapid-fire stick-it-to-the-establishment bangers, but a more character-driven, textural approach, as Smith previously mentioned. “Like Colin said, we’re a very album focused band,” Smith says, adding to Caulfield’s earlier observation of Frog in Boiling Water being a more conversational project. “You kind of make songs piecemeal, and then maybe a couple months later, you make another song. And then at that point you’re basically curating through the scraps that you have. And so we’ve kind of put together a record that sounded like this and felt like something more brooding or whatever. Who knows, maybe next time, we’ll feel like making a fast, kraut-y record again. We did enjoy being this chaotic, raucous live band. Even the slow songs, we played fast back then. The songs on Frog in Boiling Water are much more deliberate in terms of writing and arrangement. We want people to hear all the music unfolding slower, which allows you to do more with the song.”
Though the album addresses some bleak subjects filed under ‘modern living’, DIIV make a point of instilling each song with a sometimes warped sense of joy and hope. It’s a naïveté inherently specific to being a part of Gen-X, who saw the final curtain of a pre-internet fall, yearning for a way out from the clutches of the ruling classes. It runs parallel with DIIV’s shift from Smith’s personal troubles inadvertently becoming the lightning rod, to them honing a more democratic workmanlike approach to their craft. “I feel there’s nostalgia for a pre-internet world, but also optimism for a post-internet world,” Smith muses. “I think the weird AI-generated bullshit we’re creating for it is feeding the machine of dead internet space. Like garbage that floods it and takes it over. Just like your cellphone becoming obsolete for answering calls because it’s flooded with spam. Or your mailbox is flooded with all this bullshit, so you don’t bother checking it. It’s hopeful for a future where the internet is killed by all the past. So it’s a nostalgic past/nostalgic future kind of idea.”
This observation aligns well with the feverish mid-tempo outings such as “Somber The Drums” and “Raining On A Pillow”, in which DIIV’s feverish shoegaze-tides sound polluted by a junkyard of smoldering, metallic textures. Smith’s wispy vocals are drowned out as the only discernible human element, washed within the outpour of machine-like ‘progress’. There is still a delirium of optimism present, taken as the better alternative from all-out cynicism: “There’s a river out there somewhere winding from the fall/There’s a river out there somewhere i’m the only owner of”. Like Joni Mitchell famously yearning for a river to skate away on, Smith’s protagonist seeks a reprieve in the fantasy of the systems collapsing and the deck reshuffling to his benefit.
“It’s about this false longing. The underlying idea of the song is that there’s not a river out there that you are the owner of. You’re seeking some kind of place or meaning that probably doesn’t exist.” Newman chips in with a “silly stoner thought”: “You can’t own a river. You know? Like, it kind of belongs to nature. Like Cole was saying, it’s like a false hope that you would be able to own something like that.” “It started out with cowboy movies,” Bailey interjects. “And then it was zombie movies. We have this obsession with imagining society collapsing in this really hopeful way. ‘If that happens, then I will succeed in one way or another.’ So it’s not like we invented this idea of the false hope scenario. This is just the contemporary version of it.”
““Everyone Out” deals with that as well”, Smith reacts. “You pray for an acceleration of the collapse of society in the hope you will randomly get shuffled to the top. Because there isn’t a path otherwise. And so I think it’s kind of based on an accelerationist wish. There’s so little hope that you’re like ‘When it all gets reshuffled, I’ll be the fucking king’. I think those two songs — “Raining On A Pillow” and “Everyone Out” are closely linked.” DIIV, as a bigger mid-level touring band, are fully aware of navigating the challenges to make your pipe dream your actual living. Measly streaming revenues, corrupt infrastructures and merch cuts do make it difficult to imagine your own private river where you can dictate the terms and directions.
Smith– who co-founded the United Musicians And Allied Workers, an organization that advocates for better working conditions for musicians — isn’t beating around the bush. “These are bleak times right now to be a musician and I think that solidarity between musicians is really important. And musicians talking about their financial situations and the gutting of funding for making music, I think it’s really important, because ultimately they’re just systems. But obviously, it’s difficult for musicians to unionize: we don’t share employers. It’s a decentralized system. I think there’s a lot of benefits to musicians like banding together and demanding change and a variety of ways.”
For now, DIIV, like many peers, are teetering in that liminal space, only able to go where the waters take them. In that trajectory, the ideals and dreams of the band’s honeymoon phase, where an ocean of possibilities seemed to wait, feel rather quaint. Four albums in, how much of it can DIIV preserve without being swallowed up by the machine completely? ”Social media has changed the way that people interact with musicians,” Smith explains. “They kind of have to be your parasocial bestie online. There’s this high degree of accessibility. I feel like when you’re a musician a lot of stuff that you make is part of your art in general. And so we wanted to create a world around this record. Stuff like “Soul-net” and the fake Saturday Night Live Performance, we wanted to create a world and live in it, and use social media as an expression of that. But again, it’s hard to deliberately communicate your art to people and not us as individuals — or me as an individual — but as the band itself communicating.”
By putting that barrier between listener and artist, it granted DIIV more wiggle room to be more playful with their music and venture beyond the stale narratives of being a beloved band that has reckoned with their past drama. It allowed them to also have fun with it, even with some of the abjectly grim subject matter Frog in Boiling Water. They invited Limp Bizkit-frontman Fred Durst to make a cameo in the video for “Brown Paper Bag”, which features DIIV performing — as Smith mentioned earlier — a spoof of a SNL-performance, before stuff literally breaks and collapses from above. In certain shots, the band members are replaced by stand-in actors, and after the applause it cuts to a slick Soul-net infomercial framing resistance as a “pathological response to underlying issues”.
Though Durst’s appearance in the music video could simply be chalked up to random fun, it doesn’t feel entirely like a coincidence either. Limp Bizkit were after all the lightning rod of outrage for their performance at Woodstock ’99 — a strong example of systemic collapse within the music industry. Some would argue that their aggressive performance riled up a potentially dangerous situation escalating further; others saw it as a Lord of the Flies-like revolt against the greedy oppressors. It was a far cry from the hippie utopia the original Woodstock sold to the public. “I was talking earlier about theater,” Smith remarks. “Limp Bizkit was kind of like a character study and maybe this accelerationist, patriarchal male type of misdirected anger. I kind of see that band as being a bit. Fred was really cool because he performs as this character, and I think his actual personality is so at odds with the character that he plays on stage. It makes him a really fascinating person.”
Bailey is highly skeptical about conflating the festival experience to notions of peace, love and understanding, even though this still is perpetuated by infrastructures today. “I don’t think the original Woodstock was like this beacon of hope for a better society that was squashed by Woodstock ’99. I think of both as detrimental to actual progress in society in different ways. Both were pressure valves that the people running the show sort of led off in the 60s, peace and love as a response to the conservatism of the 50s. But it was still just ‘Alright, this is gonna blow up into an actual violent revolution if we don’t let them have a little bit’, And so they gave them the hippie movement an outlet. The same thing happened in the late 90s, you get “Break Stuff”, let’s set it all on fire.”
“People still talk about Burning Man or something like this utopian experiment,” Newman adds. “With music festivals today, all of that pretense has been dropped, and it’s really just the spectacle and entertainment. I don’t think there’s any ‘We could build a better world if we had music festivals every day. I don’t think people feel that way anymore. You come there to spend your money, you feel pretty good for a few days, and then you go home.”
Smith: “And they are incredibly corporatized. It’s literally a corporate monopoly from the top. Instead of thinking of musicians like workers who deserve to be paid for making music, against a Spotify streaming music where you supposedly have all of music ever made at any time for like 10 bucks a month — kind devalues music, when it’s such an essential part of the human experience.”
Which brings us to the silver lining behind the slow burn that is Frog in Boiling Water: what is it the four members of DIIV clutch onto?
Bailey: “Similar to some of the characters on our album, just clinging to this idea of keeping my head down and keep going forward, I will one day have the life that I always thought I would have. That’s what gets you out of bed every morning. If I give up, it won’t happen. And learning how to do that, and at the same time, realizing that I’m probably never going to be happier than I am now. There’s no reason to believe that it’s gonna get better or worse. And so every moment of the day, just try to be conscious of how I’m living my life. And whether or not it’s good or bad, this is how I react to that fact. I have to keep reminding myself of that to get out of bed every day.”
Newman: “I definitely agree with that. The things that came to my mind are the solid, more material things. I like to go on hikes and I like to hang out with my dogs and my wife, and that kind of stuff is always super grounding. Makes me feel like an Earthling, you know? And then also — and this isn’t something that is always accessible to me — but a lot of times I will find a new style of art or music to get into. Sometimes that just really connects. For example, I’ve been really into electronic music for a couple of years and as someone who plays rock music as a kid, it’s like this whole new world that I’m just always discovering more stuff. When I’m able to get in the mindspace to be obsessed with something, I can shut everything off and just go into a hole of like music and art. Like I said, I’m not always able to do that. But when I am, it really connects.”
Cole: “For me, it’s family. You know, I got a one-year-old who was born when we were making the record. And so it was this really interesting thought experiment that was happening all through the record: making an album about how fucked up the world is, and at the same time, bringing a kid into that world. There was this sense of hope that I had, and that I kind of had to keep for myself. Because otherwise, how could you bring a child into this world? I reflected a lot on that, and I think that that was the genesis of building some hope into the music itself. Because I was experiencing this insane paradox. For me that’s just the most beautiful thing to do: to watch him grow up and change and become himself. And that’s something I hold onto: family and the small scale stuff. Like Ben and Bailey mentioned before: in making this record, we initially zoomed out a lot, so we had to zoom back into our personal lives as well to stay sane, you know?”
Colin: “And the more you zoom out, the only thing that is left that’s important are the tangible, individual relationships with people. Because you become so dwarfed by the systems around you. You can literally go insane if you focus only on that. For me it has been my girlfriend and my dogs. And then from there, family and also the band: relationships and connections to people. The shows right now feel so deeply special, you know? And not really like ‘Omigod, look how popular we are now. on stage above these people’. More like ‘Everyone is in this room for the same reason. This thing we do as a band that doesn’t exist without the people watching us and doesn’t exist without us. And so it’s like this complete connection on a very deep level with all these people in-between us. And that definitely gives me hope. It makes me feel way less disconnected from this world and this reality.”
