There is a powerful scene in Jonathan Glazer’s recent Academy Award-winning film, The Zone of Interest, in which the camera lingers on the flowers in a garden while gunshots and screaming are heard in the background. The garden is at the home of the commandant of the Auschwitz concentration camp. The gunshots and screams are coming from the camp just beyond the garden wall. Glazer’s point isn’t that beauty endures amidst atrocity but how beauty can distract us from addressing atrocity, thus underscoring a frightening limit to beauty.
Frog in Boiling Water is the fourth album from DIIV (pronounced “Dive” for the uninitiated) in 12 years. Their debut, Oshin, from 2012, was a bright and sanguine dream pop confection that drew widespread acclaim. Their sophomore effort, Is the Is Are, from 2016, further developed their atmospheric sound, though it took a slight turn for the worst, lasting just over an hour with 17 tracks. Though ambitious, the record drifts by the middle and loses focus toward the end. Zachary Cole Smith, DIIV’s frontman, struggled with drug addiction at the time, as well as drummer Colby Hewitt, who eventually left the band. Bassist Devin Ruben Perez also departed due to controversial remarks he made online.
Following this fraught period, DIIV embraced a darker and harsher shoegaze sound on their excellent third LP, Deceiver (2019), seemingly breaking out of the cul-de-sac they had created on Is the Is Are. Thick walls of distortion on tracks like “Like Before You Were Born”, “Taker”, and “The Spark” proved immersive in the best way, enveloping the listener in an escapist headspace that felt new while recalling the best of forebears like My Bloody Valentine and early Jesus and Mary Chain.
Their new album, Frog in Boiling Water, continues in this generative direction. Musically, it is by far their strongest recording. The lethargic (in a good way) opener, “In Amber”, sets the atmosphere for this album, which possesses the beautiful melancholy that inhabits the best releases in the shoegaze genre. The second track and single, “Brown Paper Bag”, continues this mood, launching into an exhilarating skyward melodic line after 80 seconds or so. The disconsolate “Raining on Your Pillow” similarly pulls you in with a shimmering guitar line that evokes those of the Cure and the Church. The title track, “Frog in Boiling Water”, is also deeply satisfying with its reverb-drenched temperament.
As the title indicates, DIIV have more on their minds than mining emotions and experimenting with fuzz and delay pedal effects. Similar to the allegory it invokes, they seem preoccupied with how the world is in denial with everything that is going on – a point also related in Glazer’s film – leaving everyone in peril. The first track, “In Amber”, has Smith singing, “The banality of evil poisons the garden”, which gives pause. The banality of evil is, of course, an idea that Hannah Arendt proposed in her famous work of long-form journalism, Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963), to explain how ordinary people could participate in the genocidal violence of the Holocaust. What is it doing here?
Beyond this opening sentiment on “In Amber”, whose chorus repeats uneasily “I can’t look away” and “I want to disappear”, Frog in Boiling Water concerns itself with a range of contemporary issues. “Raining on Your Pillow” is purportedly about American imperialism (“Kill the soldier that’s behind the eyes”), though that didn’t occur to me on first listen, given how submerged the lyrics were in the mix. “Little Birds” is also about war (“Fighting all the time / Came home in a hearse”). The track “Reflected” has the line, “Remind me why our parasites are still in control.” The first single, “Soul Net”, was independently released on a website that delved into conspiracy theories and paranoia.
In short, Frog in Boiling Water aspires to be a statement album of some kind, reflecting our zeitgeist moment of right-wing extremism, global conflict, environmental collapse, and self-devouring late capitalism. Yet, these issues don’t entirely come into coherent focus on this record. As much as these sentiments may be agreeable – DIIV, like any group, have the right to express what they want – the shoegaze genre doesn’t easily lend itself to expressing political views.
I say this cautiously. However, the favoring of atmospherics over crisp delivery, mood over message, and vibe over vocal clarity has made shoegaze a musical style that favors escapism rather than realism. The heavy use of effects pedals and distortion is essentially about departing from the limitations—the material realities—of the electric guitar itself. By extension, the emergence of shoegaze during the late 1980s and 1990s was also arguably about middle-class kids seeking to escape the social realities created by Thatcherism and Reaganism.
These observations circle back to Glazer. The Zone of Interest is many things, though one concern he expresses in different ways throughout the film is the moral uncertainty of fictionalizing the Holocaust itself, which leads him to depict it indirectly, whether through background noise or personal items at the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum. To film the violence of the Holocaust directly, to fictionalize it, is to risk minimizing it.
DIIV haven’t asked the same questions of genre, subject matter, and moral intention. Like their lyrics, they can’t look away, but they also seem to want to disappear. As a result, Frog in Boiling Water approximates the flowers in Glazer’s film. It is a beautiful album with gorgeous tracks. Nonetheless, they ultimately distract from, rather than illuminate, the important subjects they seek to address.