“The past is written in stone and you can’t like change it, you just have to address it and move on.” With DIIV’s new record (the band’s fourth), Frog in Boiling Water, frontman Cole Zachery Smith shifted his viewpoint. With the world at once halting and also spiralling completely out of control (the record was partially written during Covid), instead of dwelling on their tumultuous past and introspection, the band look outwards, pointing their finger at society’s systemic foundations that push us down rather than lift us up. With such subject matter comes a sonic evolution. The amorphous, layered waves of sound DIIV have become synonymous with still ride, build and curl throughout Frog in Boiling Water, however – to borrow from the album title – they’ve become scorched, and crash deeper.

Prior to the album’s release, DIIV published a website – soul-net.co – an infinite Web 0.1 scroll that posed statements like, ‘Trapped by Yourself?’ questioned ‘the military industrial complex picking and choosing what is cool and where to go’, and featured sections on Knot theory, the circlon model of neutron structure alongside bursts of dark web paranoia – “Turn from the light because they are harvesting YOUR suffering.” All over the place, in design and context, there’s something so familiar and addictive about it all – it’s the world we know so well, just another screen to get lost in. Following the release of Frog in Boiling Water to acclaimed reviews, we sit down with DIIV to dig deeper.

Alex James Taylor What was the general feeling in the band when you began Frog In Boiling Water? What was your mindset when you were preparing to make the album?
Zachery Cole Smith: It’s funny how as soon as you finish making an album you’re thinking about what’s next. For me it was really apparent after finishing the first album, where it was like, “We did it!” But then you have to make another one. But I think the process changed a ton of times for this record between that initial stage and when we finished it.

AJT: Did you know what you wanted from the album? It took four years to make the album, right? 
ZCS: Yeah.
Ben Newman: That’s kind of standard, unfortunately. [laughs] But no, we didn’t know… or we thought we did several different times. It changed a bunch over that time. Because after Deceiver, it felt really easy – like, “Oh, let’s just do that again.” But then the pandemic happened. By then our feelings, tastes and interests had changed, so it started going in a different direction, which then continued to happen.

AJT: This album is a lot more outward-looking than your previous work. Especially for you, Cole – with past albums you’ve explored your own state of mind, whereas this one addresses societal issues and systems. Was this due to you feeling more settled in yourself?
ZCS: I think that’s definitely part of it. It’s like, you do the work on yourself and that gives you permission to look outside. It just felt like we had to do a lot of clean-up and reckoning within the band. There was a narrative that was thrust upon us and we had to deal with it. The past is written in stone and you can’t change it, you just have to address it and move on. On Deceiver we wanted to do that and put that personal part of the narrative to rest. There were some outward-looking moments on that record, which was a transition maybe. It’s something we’ve always wanted to do, there was just other stuff we had to do first.

AJT: In the album’s notes, it speaks about the band dynamics being frayed and pushing and pulling at each other. Was the process for this album the same as previous ones? How did it work?
BN: It was different. It’s kind of like each album progressively got a little bit more collaborative. Deceiver was, at that time, the most collaborative – where we were in a rehearsal space together for hours. Then with this one, rather than be in a live space like that, we did a similar writing process, but more in our own little pods on the computer, sending demos back and forth. I think that was the main difference between Deceiver and this one.

AJT: Did you enjoy that way of working?
BN: Yeah, I mean, that’s kind of the most fun part, making demos by yourself. It’s really easy because you can do anything  Then turning those little snippets into actual songs is the hard part.

AJT: Is it difficult to stay focused on the initial concept for an album during the course of making it, or do you leave that open-ended?
ZCS: We were always really focused on making something, but as Ben said, the ideas kept changing and our tastes changed, you change as people and so does the context. So over the course of making the record, at times we all probably had radically different ideas about what the record was going to sound like, and it’s really hard to communicate that to somebody, especially to three other people. You know, talking about music is hard, it’s hard to quantify stuff into concrete things. We had approached the record so many times, like, it’s going to be all electronic drum machine stuff, or it’s going to be live sounding, or it’s going to be heavy, or it’s going to be slow. Whatever it was, you’d send a song and it would capture something about what you wanted the record to be, but it could be an outlier or it could push in a new direction. Sometimes if I made a demo I wouldn’t necessarily have an idea of what it would sound like by the time it was done, it was just raw material.

AJT: Were you all on the same wavelength from the beginning?
BN: I think us being on the same page came and went many different times. Some days it felt really harmonious, and then sometimes it felt like we were all on different planets.
ZCS: Yeah, there are a couple of moments where something would really click and then you’d chase that. Or there were times where we’d be writing together, passing instruments around and we’d get in a flow.

AJT: I wanted to ask, is Fender on the Freeway, is that a reference to Christian Marclay’s guitar drag?
ZCS: Oh, a lot of people think it’s a guitar, which is kind of funny, but it’s the image of a car bumper. But I like the double meaning there.

AJT: Which track came first in the album? Which one solidified what was going to happen across the rest of the album?
ZCS: A lot of them happened at different times so I bet you would get a different answer from each of us. Reflected was a really early one that was a complete thought. The song wasn’t totally done or anything, but it had something about it that seemed more finished than some of the other demos. I think Fender on the Freeway also was, because early in the process I was just obsessed with that band Jesu, and I think I sent like 30 demos that were all called like, ‘Jesu 1’ or ‘Jesu 2’, and trying to do that a million times until it seemed like people weren’t on board with that particular sound. [laughs] But that was one that died and then was revived many, many times.
BN: Yeah, I think a lot of the demos would sit there for a while and then kind of get forgotten about and then brought back once we had exhausted some other options and we’d be like, “Oh yeah, there’s this one.”

AJT: It’s cool to hear your progression through all the albums. This album feels a lot more dense and heavy, can you take us through some of the the technical aspects of the production?
ZCS: As a songwriter, my instinct is to layer tons of shit. In the early 2000s when I was learning how to record music, everybody had those tape machines, but I had a sound card on my computer that you could just put infinite shit on, and I loved layering stuff. Then my grandma would come over for Christmas and be like, “Play me something on guitar,” and I’m like, “Well, I can’t play a song on guitar. It has to be layered.” [laughs] But a huge lesson we learned on this record was that there’s only so much space within a song before it starts getting clogged, there’s only so much room. Chris [Coady, producer] was really good at helping us do the hard part, which was deleting stuff. Our instinct is to throw ideas on top of ideas. But I think the reason [this album] is able to sound so clear, still dense but not oversaturated, was the editing process and just deleting things. Figuring out what your ear would go towards in each particular part and arranging the textures to fit. We were doing a lot of work with tape loops and stuff that could work under the entire song as a block, and we could layer those into really cool textures that sounded amazing isolated, but then when you throw them into the song with everything else, it just kind of became like a soup. There were a lot of tough decisions about deleting stuff that we loved or paring things back.

AJT: Did you record in, California?
ZCS: Mm hmm.

AJT: You’ve previously recorded in New York, what do you see as the main differences?
BN: I will say, recording at Chris’ studio [in LA] was definitely [different to] a New York experience, because there’s a big backyard and there are deer and coyotes around all the time. I think everything kind of seeps its way into making the music, but I’d never really thought about making a California record versus a New York record.
ZCS: Also, for the writing side of the album, the environment was just our houses [due to Covid] on the computer, so it really makes you want to make a headphones record because there’s this kind of claustrophobic, solo experience. To me, that was the main thing that coloured the sound of the record, the writing process being more isolated.

DIIV’s album Frog in Boiling Water is out now.