Two days before playing the first date of a headlining theater tour, members of the rock band Diiv are sitting around a picnic table in the parking lot of a Burbank rehearsal studio, reminiscing about stadium shows. who opened last fall for Depeche Mode.
They talk about the shiny jackets frontman Dave Gahan wore onstage (only to take them off after a few minutes) and the moves he did every night on the catwalk; they talk about the confidence they developed playing in front of thousands of people who hadn't come to see Diiv (but were open to being won over by the right performance).
Also: They talk about catering. “Boy, I miss that,” says guitarist Andrew Bailey, as if lost in the memory of endlessly reheating dishes.
Diiv misses out on many of the borrowed benefits of A-list rock stardom on the tour behind his latest album, “Frog in Boiling Water.” After launching in early June, the tour stops at the Wiltern in Los Angeles (Diiv's hometown, more or less, since three of the four members moved here from New York a few years ago) on Saturday the night.
However, the musicians, all between 30 and 40 years old, seem no less eager to come out and play their new songs; In fact, they say the music reflects the fact that “we've committed our lives to this band,” as bassist Colin Caulfield puts it, even without the kind of “long-term infrastructure” that might attract people their age. Caulfield adds, wryly, “No one matches our 401(k) retirement plan.”
The Diiv's determination is justified. Easily the most impressive of the group's four LPs, “Frog in Boiling Water” is also probably the best rock record released so far this year: a dense, lush set of post-shoegaze guitar jams that evoke a pop Nirvana. dreamlike. With their layers of fuzz and trippy yet propulsive beats, songs like “Brown Paper Bag” and “Raining on Your Pillow” fit easily into the shoegaze revival that has recently taken off on TikTok and introduced '80s and '90s bands like My Bloody Valentine and Slowdive, loud but sensitive guys known for staring at their effects pedals, to a new generation of young fans. However, Diiv combines those immersive textures with much stronger compositions than you'll find, for example, on Spotify's popular Shoegaze Now playlist.
“When it comes to music in this genre, there are a lot of attempts to emulate what came before,” says Jasamine White-Gluz of the Montreal band No Joy, who has toured with Diiv. “So you're just making a 'Loveless' or a 'Souvlaki', trying to fit into the box of what shoegaze is,” she adds, referring to seminal albums by MBV and Slowdive, respectively. “Diiv doesn't do that: they have their own sound. “They are in the box but they are making it bigger.”
Part of what sets “Frog in Boiling Water” apart is the political thrust of singer Zachary Cole Smith's lyrics, which reflect on the brutality of late capitalism and the deceptions of the military-industrial complex, ideas that he says appealed to him. after he and his wife brought their first child into the world about a year ago. (Let his words about “rotating villains benefit[ing] off suffering” are not at all intelligible represents something of a break with much shoegaze music, in which the vocals serve as just another instrumental component).
“I think the record conveys a sense of hope,” Smith says, “despite all the evidence that we’re heading for total collapse.”
Whether optimistic or not, the album's focus on the outside world represents Smith's effort to move beyond the personal demons that long defined Diiv. In 2013, Smith was arrested in New York with his then-girlfriend, singer Sky Ferreira, for possession of heroin; exhaustively detailed his experiences with addiction and recovery on Diiv’s “Is the Is Are” from 2016 and “Deceiver” from 2019. Of the latter, Smith says his hope was that it would “take out the trash a little bit, so that now we can talk about other things in our music.”
Yet a recent review of “Frog in Boiling Water” on Pitchfork made him wonder whether he’s achieved that much leeway. In a thread on indie-rock’s X-Way that went viral, Smith wrote about seeing his music “meet with an unwillingness to accept me as the person I’ve worked so diligently over the past eight years to become”; he also lamented that his bandmates (Diiv’s fourth member is drummer Ben Newman) are “still at the mercy of a public tendency to root discussion of our band around a past they personally suffered through, too.” (The review, which was positive, began with a mention of Smith’s arrest.)
“I’m not the one who decides when people stop talking about these events in my life,” Smith acknowledges in Burbank. “But not including the rest of the story or where it led me, I think is a damaging mindset for sober people. It makes me sad to think of someone who is experiencing addiction and looks at that and thinks, ‘Damn, I’ll always be this destructive force,’” he says. “People can change—deeply.”
Zachary Cole Smith of the Division
(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)
One effect of Smith’s shift is the democratization of Diiv’s creative process. During the band’s early days, the music was unquestionably a product of Smith’s vision, a situation he recalls with complicated feelings: “In my active addiction I was selfish and ego-driven in a really unsustainable way,” he admits; recovery led him to “want to step back from a leadership role” and invite greater input from his bandmates a la Sonic Youth, to name a pivotal act with more than one person in a controlling role.
“I think that decision to open ourselves up to being everyone's band is what made the record great,” says Chris Coady, who produced “Frog in Boiling Water” and is known for his work with TV on the Radio and Yeah Yeah Yeahs. . “As a producer, it was kind of a nightmare,” he adds with a laugh, explaining that getting everyone to agree on every decision meant the sessions at his studio in northeast Los Angeles weren't short. “But all four of them are good at all kinds of things, and this allowed them to come together in a really cool way.”
That shared investment in Diiv – and the belief that together they have reached a new artistic peak with “Frog in Boiling Water” – has buoyed the band members after a long period of turmoil, even at a time of gaining life as For many, the musician feels more precarious than in decades.
“All our eggs are in this basket,” Smith says as he returns to rehearsal. “It's terrifying… and exciting.”
