DIIV

DIIV release “Raining On Your Pillow,” the final single from their forthcoming new album, Frog in Boiling Water, out this Friday via Fantasy Records.

Of the song, the band says “‘Raining on Your Pillow’ is a song which brings to mind the shameful past (and present) of American imperialism. Lost in a terrifying landscape, a lone soldier ruminates on the existence of a landscape of his own far removed from conflict. Does it matter if this place is real or not? Is a false sense of hope enough to give our lives meaning in the midst of despair? A looping guitar figure plays underneath a driving rhythm in a cloud of murky atmosphere of analog synths and tape loops. Menacing, doomed, and strangely hopeful.”

DIIV is hitting the road next month on a North American tour in support of Frog in Boiling Water. All dates below.

DIIV is Andrew Bailey, Colin Caulfield, Ben Newman, and Zachary Cole Smith.

For the final instalment of the “Frog In Boiling Water” album release, DIIV has created a conceptual film in the guise of a music video for the single “Raining on Your Pillow.” The band collaborated with experimental film directing team, TRLLM (Jak Ritger & K8 Howl) and visionary fine artist, Harry Gould Harvey IV. Together, the group translated the songs themes of military desertion, desire for solace and challenging one’s ideology into an abstract collage of high-speed videography and hand-drawings.

The film picks up threads from the ongoing saga of subterfuge established by DIIV’s album release run: Soul-Net, the evil corporation that the band has partnered with has created a secret hyper-advanced AI named S.E.P.I.A. or Spiritual Enhancement Protocol & Intelligent Augmentation. The S.E.P.I.A. program was shut down abruptly, but many believe that it has escaped its hardware and roams the world.

“Raining on Your Pillow” is the last known transmission from S.E.P.I.A. We are put into its hyper-speed POV (which appears as ultra-slomo) as it hunts for DIIV who have now defected from Soul-Net and joined with the protest group named Freedom In A Boundless World (F.I.B.W). We watch as S.E.P.I.A. discovers “The Architect” played by Harry Gould Harvey IV and absorbs his thoughts. His drawings infect the system opening up divergent pathways.

As the film progresses, we traverse the strange landscape of contemporary life. The rare 2005 handheld high-speed camera used to capture these scenes unveils hidden moiré patterns beneath architecture and nature. The band hides out behind flickering TVs. The textures and rhythms of the song echo through highways, rivers, battleships, textiles, corridors, birds and planes.

The video concludes with an ominous yet hopeful image: S.E.P.I.A. disappears into a flickering night light, full of all the complex and contradictory images that make modern life so confusing. But, with the understanding that by living with the mess, looking beneath or in-between, we can begin to uncover the cognitive maps that hold together our existence.

Frog In Boiling Water, produced by Chris Coady, was a four-year process that nearly broke the band before the album was completed. With an aim to push their sound, make a record that challenged them, and treat the band as a democracy for the first time, DIIV began an ambitious journey, both individually and collectively. This journey left their relationships with one another fraying, with the many complex dynamics of family, friendship and finances entangled, coupled with suspicions, resentments, bruised egos and anxious questions. They ultimately found their way through, and the result is 10 songs that mine a new lyrical and musical depth, those two halves mirroring one another inside a reflective and immersive whole. It is a mesmeric testament to enduring, to envisioning anything else on the other side while you remain here, in the slowly heating water of right now.
 
Frog in Boiling Water, both the title and the themes of the record, reference “The Boiling Frog” in Daniel Quinn’s The Story of B. The band explains, “If you drop a frog in a pot of boiling water, it will of course frantically try to clamber out. But if you place it gently in a pot of tepid water and turn the heat on low, the frog will sink into a tranquil stupor, exactly like one of us in a hot bath, and before long, with a smile on its face, it will unresistingly allow itself to be boiled to death.”
 
“We understand the metaphor to be one about a slow, sick, and overwhelmingly banal collapse of society under end-stage capitalism, the brutal realities we’ve maybe come to accept as normal. That’s the boiling water and we are the frogs. The album is more or less a collection of snapshots from various angles of our modern condition which we think highlights what this collapse looks like and, more particularly, what it feels like.”