DIIV have returned with news of their fourth album: Frog in Boiling Water is due for release on May 24 via Fantasy Records. Today, the band – Andrew Bailey, Colin Caulfield, Ben Newman, and Zachary Cole Smith – have previewed it with a new single called ‘Brown Paper Bag’. Check it out and find the album cover and tracklist below.
The follow-up to 2019’s Deceiver was produced by Chris Coady. According to a press release, the four-year process leading to the album’s completion nearly broke the band: “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.”
The album title is a reference to Daniel Quinn’s 1996 novel The Story of B. “If you drop a frog in a pot of boiling water, it will of course frantically try to clamber out,” the band explained. “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,” they added. “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.”
Frog in Boiling Water Cover Artwork:
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