DIIV have announced a new album, Frog in Boiling Water, which is their fourth and first in four years, and will be out May 24 via Fantasy. The record was made with producer Chris Coady, and the path leading to its completion was apparently a hard one that, according to the press release, “nearly broke the band.”
The album title is a reference to the old story about the frog in a pot of cold water that is put on the boil, who stays in until it’s too late. “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,” say the band. “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.”
The album includes “Soul Net,” which the band released last year via a weird website, and the new single is “Brown Paper Bag,” a slow, sludgy, but soaring number that recalls the early ’90s where shoegaze and grunge rubbed elbows. You can listen to that below.
DIIV played both “Soul Net” and “Brown Paper Bag” on tour last fall, which included dates opening for Depeche Mode. No tour for Frog in Boiling Water has been announced yet.
Frog In Boiling Water
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
