Brooklyn’s DIIV announced their fourth album Frog In Boiling Water – first since 2019’s Deceiver – last week with the chilled-out dirge “Brown Paper Bag”, but they first previewed the new record way back in October while in the midst of their tour supporting Depeche Mode.

They dropped the website soul-net.co, a Geocities-saluting doomscrolling eyesore, soundtracked by a new song of the same name, and this week they released an actual video for the song that shows the band on a Zoom meeting screen share navigating same said URL. Clearly, their promo budget is not… immense.

The new record is out May 24, and the band have this to say about it, and how the title reflects the decline of modern society. Cheery stuff.

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.

DIIV
DIIV announce new album Frog In Boiling Water @ The Fader