Nine Songs: DIIV

This was the greeting that I received from a steward at O2 Forum Kentish Town last March, ahead of DIIV’s first UK show in support of their fourth album, Frog In Boiling Water. The unusual welcome was also accompanied by a handout with obscure messaging, building the mystique of the event. By that point, Frog In Boiling Water hadn’t yet been released, but such gestures contributed to an elaborate world being built around it.

Towards the end of 2023, the band had a complete social media rebrand that embodied their lead single, “Soul-net”. Their Instagram was wiped clean and refilled with unsettling clickbait-style content, and they made a website that could only be explored by infinite scrolls through media that veered somewhere along the lines of conspiratorial, paranoid, and esoteric. They even went as far as to stage a fake SNL episode for their second single, “Brown Paper Bag”, that blurred the lines between reality and performance art so much that fans themselves were uncertain about what was real.

This was to draw attention to the album’s themes of late-stage capitalism, climate anxiety, and the slow, anxious threat of societal collapse, all of which feel uncomfortably prescient. Tackling such intense narratives, which centre around trying to find hope through a thick, impending sense of doom, naturally came with its own strain.

It was the first time DIIV operated as a true democracy, where all four members were able to contribute ideas equally. While it was a process that ultimately proved to be creatively fruitful, it came with a level of emotional exhaustion that nearly fractured the band completely.

When I catch up with DIIV before their London show at HERE at Outernet, the Frog In Boiling Water era is coming to an end. A concert film titled Boiled Alive, which premiered at the beginning of December, would see the end of the album cycle. Among the band, things appear to be much smoother. “Fortunately, we got through that by the time the album was done,” drummer Ben Newman says, reflecting on the tension that seeped into the development of Frog In Boiling Water. “We haven’t really had a big conflict in a really long time.”

An important part of DIIV finding more stable ground seemed to come from acknowledging their strengths in the midst of the more challenging points. As bassist Colin Caulfield tells me, their live cohesion came more naturally than figuring out where everyone fits in the writing room.

“The hard part about writing is figuring out what your role is,” Caulfield explains. “Live, it’s very much like gears that fit together. I remember Ben saying once, ‘There’s one thing I’m really good at, and it’s playing drums for DIIV,’ and I feel that same way. We’re all really good at this job. And so, in a way, it feels really good to do something you’re good at. You feel you’re pitching in at points, and you feel you’re doing it well.”

Newman concurs: “When you’re writing, you’re trying to get your idea into the song, and there’s this feeling of, ‘If I don’t do it now, the moment’s going to be gone forever.’ So there’s a bit more intensity in that. It was democratic in that anyone was able to bring an idea, but that doesn’t mean that everybody will like the idea. Everybody has to argue and figure out who likes their thing enough to fight for it.”

“And democracies never worked anywhere,” notes lead vocalist and guitarist Zachary Cole Smith. “It’s really messy,” which prompts his bandmates to laugh. Caulfield adds, “There’s always some sort of power hierarchy. And I feel usually, at least with politics, we think of that negatively. But then after doing something like making an album, you come away and think that maybe it is good when there’s a person that everything flows through. And you can still achieve some sort of democratic system where there’s still room for people to bring ideas forward.”

“The tripped out thing about Frog was that since you could have an idea about anything, you felt this pressure to have an idea about anything, but a lot of times you don’t”, Smith explains, “And it’s okay if you look at something or listen to it, and you’re just like, ‘That’s cool. I don’t know what to add.’”

Ultimately, this amounted to a body of work that, retrospectively, the band can say that they’re happy with. “I always feel a lot of distance once the album is done,” says Newman. “Mentally, I move on from it. I still love it, and I am proud of it, but I feel I’ve moved on to new ideas.”

Whilst DIIV are ready to move on from Frog In Boiling Water, they’re keeping the lessons that they learned from it close, whilst also being able to acknowledge the importance of the album as it sits within their catalogue now. “It taught us a lot about how to make music and how to do a show,” Caulfield says. “We learned so much about our own blind spots that you mightn’t have when you’re just indulgently recording or something, especially with the idea of making it the perfect record and taking things so seriously.”

“In my mind, it is *that* record for us. When you look at bands’ discographies, a lot of times there’s the one record where you’re thinking, ‘They went a bit hard on that one’, where it’s the grand record. And it’s cool to zoom out, thinking about our discography in that way in the same way that I think about other bands, because when you look at someone’s list of albums you don’t necessarily think about the trajectory as they went through making them, but this feels an important record for us.”

Much of the significance of Frog In Boiling Water comes from the fact that the band allowed themselves to take risks and were successful in doing so. “I think artists should take a big swing more often,” Caulfield notes. “The stakes are just so high, and it’s really scary to risk something,” Smith adds.

The band are in agreement that they are happy with the outcome of the record. But what becomes clear through the course of our conversation through DIIV’s Nine Songs selections, which spans Leonard Cohen’s revealing poetry, My Bloody Valentine’s textured shoegaze, DJ Shadow’s sample-based hip-hop, Crass’ anarchist punk, and Sonic Youth’s uncompromising, experimental noise, is that much of DIIV’s strength lies in their differences.

Each member brings a distinct musical vocabulary, shaped by vastly different influences and experiences. And somehow, these four disparate voices have learned to harmonise. “It’s just so cool that all four of us have such different approaches to listening to music, or different motivations for listening to music,” Caulfield reflects. “But for all four of us, it’s deeply important to us, and I think there's mutual respect because of that. And that filters into being in a band too. We all love what we do, and that’s the way it’s able to continue.”

“Someone said that we’re really good at being in DIIV, and I think it’s cool to see - especially while we’re playing on stage - you look around, and it feels like we’re the ones who should be doing this.”

With that affirmation in mind, the band looks forward with a newfound lightness. “I feel very accomplished with the Frog touring cycle and everything,” Caulfield says. “We had goals that we set out, and we accomplished them. It felt like us becoming professional musicians without losing our edge or spark. We got to do a lot of stuff we wanted to do, and it feels like we have a new sense of youthful curiosity about making music again. It’s cool to feel that after getting so serious.”

As DIIV emerge from their most politically charged, conceptually ambitious, and personally challenging album cycle, they do so not just intact, but stronger. Their individual willingness to learn from each other’s vastly different musical metrics ultimately saved them. Where the democratic process could have torn DIIV apart, it actually revealed that each member is not just important, but essential.

As they talk through their individual and collective song choices, with Newman’s ability to shift between hardcore intensity and restrained minimalism, guitarist Andrew Bailey’s photographic memory for samples and his finger-style guitar precision, Caulfield’s understanding of how ugliness and beauty can coexist in the same moment, and Smith’s belief that production itself can be an act of play, they form something greater than the sum of their parts. They work as gears that slot together, each one necessary for the machine to function.