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Feb 15, 2024 By Mark Redfern Photography by Shervin Lainez

DIIV have announced a new album, Frog in Boiling Water, and shared its first single, “Brown Paper Bag.” Frog in Boiling Water is due out May 24 via Fantasy. “Brown Paper Bag” finds DIIV gloriously tumbling headfirst into choppy shoegaze currents and somehow staying afloat. Listen to it below, followed by the album’s tracklist and cover artwork.

DIIV is Andrew Bailey, Colin Caulfield, Ben Newman, and Zachary Cole Smith. Frog in Boiling Water is the follow-up to Deceiver, which came out in 2019 via Captured Tracks. It’s been five years since that album and DIIV spent four of those making the new record, a procees that a press release says almost broke the band as they strived to push their sound. This is also the first album where the band acted as a democracy. “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,” states the press release.

The album’s title was inpsired by Daniel Quinn’s 1996 philosophical novel The Story of B. The band collectively explain more about the title in the press release: “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.”

Read our 2016 interview with DIIV.

Frog in Boiling Water Tracklist:

1. In Amber
2. Brown Paper Bag
3. Raining On Your Pillow
4. Frog In Boiling Water
5. Everyone Out
6. Reflected
7. Somber the Drums
8. Little Birds
9. Soul-net
10. Fender on the Freeway

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