DIIV

Four years into making their fourth album, Frog in Boiling Water, the four members of DIIV needed to talknot later, but now.The extended process had been uncertain and sometimes grueling, not only pushing them to up their musicianship but also taxing most every resource and bond they had ever cultivated. During the prior decade, DIIV had helped revitalize dream-pop and shoegaze alike, culminating in 2019s unapologetic genre showcase, Deceiver. But with it, DIIV were now out of contract, proverbial free agents who didnt owe anything to anyone but themselvesthat is, to make a record that challenged them, that pushed their sound beyond any previous parameters.But after all that collective toil, their relationships with one another were fraying badly inside that singular alchemical state of being a band, where dynamics of family, friendship, and finances become entangled in a Gordian knot. There were suspicions and resentments, bruised egos and anxious questions, all fingerprints left by a quest that demanded DIIV grow both together and apart. So on June 1, 2023, just before they began to mix four years of effort, DIIVAndrew Bailey, Colin Caulfield, Ben Newman, and Zachary Cole Smithgathered in Echo Park Lake, the scene of so many halcyon hangs in their early days, under vaguely gray skies to air accumulated grievances. They dropped the shields of professionalism that had let them work amid the rancor and allowed themselves to get mad and bummed, real and vulnerable. Really, it could have broken DIIV before Frog in Boiling Water was finished.This fireside, however tense, worked: DIIV eventually finished Frog in Boiling Water. It is a gorgeous and haunted record, as DIIV gaze into our collective oblivion and try to articulate a trace of hope inside that enveloping gloom. Balancing rhythms first built from breakbeats and inspired by post-industrial power with guitars and vocals that often billow like diaphanous drapery, Frog in Boiling Water is mighty but breezy, greyscale but opalescent. Reflected, for instance, surges through softness, reckoning with the lies we tell ourselves to survive while wondering if they still serve us. Brown Paper Bag funnels dejection and angst into an exquisite intersection of dream-pop and post-rock, a wispy tune stretching from a steely foundation. Though DIIV helped to foster a shoegaze scene that has since swept up many imaginations, they rose above it despite nearly falling apart. On these 10 songs, they brood beautifully inside music that frets about the present and futurebut at least acknowledges it can still exist.