As they release the concert film Boiled Alive, the Brooklyn four-piece take Kayla Sandiford on a deep dive through the songs that made them.
“Hi, welcome to Soul-net.”
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.
“Suzanne” by Leonard Cohen
BEST FIT: Can you describe your first experience of listening to this song?
BEN NEWMAN: I was really into hardcore when I first got into music as a teenager, and then I moved to this punk house, which was my first time being out of my parents’ house. I was 19 years old, or maybe 18, 17, and everyone around me was older.
There was this one guy who worked at the record store and was always playing music in the house. I remember hearing that song for the first time and not really listening to the music, but the lyrics. Not even in a really emotional way, as in it was affecting me, or sometimes you listen to a song and think ‘They’re talking to me, they’re talking about me.’ It wasn’t that at all. It was more universal. Just holy shit, ‘This is actually poetry that anyone could relate to.’ It made me feel emotional, but I don’t know why.
That winter, I just listened to that album, Leonard Cohen’s first, self-titled album, probably every single day, the whole entire thing. I couldn’t get enough of the way that it made me feel, which was sad, but not depressed. They were hard to explain emotions, but it hit me really hard from the very first moment. And then I was like, ‘This is my shit.
What made “Suzanne” specifically stick out to you as opposed to the other songs on the album?
I think it’s the second verse, the ‘Jesus was a sailor when he walked upon the water' part. I don’t really know why, but having someone talk about Jesus in this abstract way, as a person and not as a God, was really interesting to me because at that age, I was confused about spirituality.
I was somewhere between being raised as an Evangelical Christian and being a hardcore atheist, which I’m neither of those now. That was part of my journey, learning to look at things through this beautiful, poetic lens. It doesn’t have to be so one or the other. Jesus could be whatever you want if you’re writing a poem about him.
“Concubine” by Converge
This is a pretty big shift from “Suzanne”.
BEN NEWMAN: This is more musical, less spiritual and poetic. Jane Doe, the album that “Concubine” is from, is the peak of metalcore as a genre. Their next album after that was really good too, but the entire genre, to me, just didn’t need to exist anymore after that. They fucking did it.
The album became such a ubiquitous symbol of that type of music, with the Jane Doe T-shirt. On a more granular level, the drumming is so insane. I feel it’s also just peak chaos, or a control of chaos. As a drummer, I thought ‘How do you do that?’ It’s not as deep, but it definitely influenced me.
When I joined DIIV, I felt I had to relearn how to play the drums and really simplify, which is really cool, because any challenge where you need to change the way that you play is good. Then, when we did Deceiver, I was able to dip back into the more caveman sound.
There were definitely some moments where - to get me to simplify - you guys would be ‘caveman’. Converge really influenced me, but I did have to subtract some of those influences.
How do you feel that these two poles relate to your general relationship with music
It’s important to me to listen to a lot of different types of music and to appreciate the whole of music. Even as a record collector, there are records that I probably won’t listen to that much, but they’re important historically, so I’ll add them to my collection. I think it’s dumb when people write off an entire genre of music. When you look at each song and each album objectively, it’s just its own thing.
“Who Sees You” by My Bloody Valentine
Can you walk me through your first experience with this song?
COLIN CAULFIELD: I remember when that album [MBV] came out and because of Loveless being so singular, there was this feeling that you had no idea what the next album would sound like.
I also remember not having very high hopes, because I didn’t want to get disappointed. Then I put it on, and that song in particular sent me into space. It sounds so fucked up and alien in this way where it feels like the whole record is being pulled into a black hole. They grabbed it at the last second, and it’s being stretched to its maximum distance, the particles or whatever.
It’s so cool that there’s so much beautiful musical content behind that album, and “Who Sees You”. All of the songs are so complex, melodic, and strange. And then to take the whole thing and just fuck it up to the maximum is very brave and inspiring to me. It’s such a cool song.
I feel my picks are similar to Ben’s, in that there’s a really emotional one and there’s one that I think is just so cool. Those are two very legitimate reasons for me to love music.
Is there a moment that defines your emotional connection to “Who Sees You?”
I remember we opened for them in 2015 or something, 2014, around when the record came out. I had earplugs in for the whole show; it was so loud. And then when that song came on, or when they played it, I remember there was a moment where I took the earplugs out in the middle of the song, and it felt like it lifted my body into the sky. That guitar line is so cool. I could talk for a long time about that record. It’s an album for me that I keep finding new reasons to enjoy, every time you peel back a layer, you find something different.
Do you try to integrate that philosophy into your own musical approach, the idea of making albums with layers?
I don’t think really about that. I don’t know if we ever approach music that way. It’s hard to know in the moment whether or not you’re definitely sneaking sounds in and paying attention to the layers.
But the thing about that song, and a lot of that record, is that only five things are happening. It’s about the texture of the sounds. There’s so much happening with the frequencies that you hear something different each time. The big thing I take away from the song is trying to remember that when you have a great song, there are a lot of different ways to present it, and it doesn’t have to sound nice or bad.
It can be somewhere in the middle where you have a lot of ugly qualities and beautiful qualities. And I think the combination of those things is a lot of times the most interesting intersection.
Opening for My Bloody Valentine is a pretty significant milestone. Did hearing the song live after filling a support slot with the band alter your experience of it?
ZACHARY COLE SMITH: We’re banned from ever opening for them again.
COLIN CAULFIELD: Because our sound guy touched one of the amps. And they were like, [whispered] ‘no’…
ZACHARY COLE SMITH: They kicked us out onto the street with all our gear.
COLIN CAULFIELD: The only regret I have about that is that if we could open for them now, we would really do it. But at the time, we weren’t even really doing shoegaze. The song I guess, it didn’t really sound that different live. It felt different. The actual what was coming out of the speakers and the amps, I was, ‘Well, it sounds just like the record.’ But then, especially when I took my earplugs off, I was, ‘Oh, this is entirely different.’
It’s this deep, physical connection that can’t really happen when you’re just in headphones or something. Thinking about that, especially because we’ve gotten really good at mimicking our recordings and getting all the guitar tones really close and playing really tight, I think there’s an additional layer of experience in live music that happens automatically, based on the weird physical experience that you’re having with your own instrument, and then with the audience and the audience with the room.
“Hannah Sun” by Lomelda
COLIN CAULFIELD: I’m going to try not to cry, but this song makes me cry literally every time I listen to it. And it’s always been like that. It actually reminds me of “Suzanne”, I’m not saying they’re on the same level, but it’s a song that is so specifically about something that also serves to just be about being alive.
You can go granular with the lyrics, especially because she mentions specific places. Sometimes songs make the world feel really big, even though it’s about a small moment. I don’t know if there’s witchcraft in the song or something, because that whole album [Hannah] is about depression and suicide. It’s about these really hyper-personal experiences.
And her name is Hannah, which I didn’t know until recently, which also makes me cry. I think that if you’ve ever had a point of feeling low, it’s a very resonant song. And I think that’s why a lot of people connect with it. Especially nowadays, there’s that feeling when you’re just overwhelmed with empathy about the world, and you simultaneously feel really hopeless. But then also, you’re just struck by how beautiful being alive is, and that song is basically that. It feels like she sacrificed her life force to make it.
Do you remember the way that you felt when you first heard “Hannah Sun”, and what made it resonate with you so deeply?
I don’t remember the first time I heard it. I do remember it coming on and thinking, ‘Oh, this is one of these songs,’ because of the way that she sings, and the production. And not even in a bad way, but it reminded me of Frankie Cosmos, a heart-on-the-sleeve, earnest, twee-esque thing.
But it really came as a surprise, getting so emotional listening to it. Because a lot of times I’ll just skip around and listen to stuff, and I usually know instantly whether I like it. And I was like, ’Oh, this is pretty cool.’ And then I was ‘Oh, the arrangement’s really good.’ Then all of a sudden I started listening to the lyrics, and I was like, ‘Well, I’m fucked.’
But with another song like "Who Sees You", it’s not like I’m getting emotional about the same thing when I listen to it, but it’s unlocking something different. And I feel there are songs where you listen to them as a different person every time. Especially if you don’t listen for months and you come back to it, something has happened in those months where you are fundamentally different, and so you find new things to apply the concepts to in your life. It resonates in a different way depending on something that might have happened.
What was life like for you when you first heard “Who Sees You” versus when you heard “Hannah Sun”? Would you say that your circumstances influenced the emotional connection that you developed with those songs?
I was so depressed before I joined DIIV, and not to say that it was my antidepressant or something, but Cole sent me an email about moving to New York and being in the band. So it was the most perfect Band-Aid to put on whatever I was going through, because it was so exciting and a big distraction. So MBV came during the distraction time. I was like, ’Nothing is wrong. Everything is great.’ And then, you know, you can’t outrun that stuff, eventually it comes back. Maybe it’s different.
And so I think by the time that I heard “Hannah Sun,” maybe it was creeping back or something, or I was feeling it. Also, opening for MBV was the best. It’s crazy. Especially when we talk about our shoegaze credentials or something, it’s a nice thing to be able to say that we did. At that time, I was just so happy, I think.
ZACHARY COLE SMITH: Remember the MBV room at Market Hotel?
COLIN CAULFIELD: I never went there, but I do know about this. You can tell the story.
COLE SMITH: There was this place in New York where we would live and practice and stuff, sometimes called Market Hotel. And when the record came out, we were so devout about MBV that there was this room, a bedroom that nobody was renting at the time, and it was just a room that was playing the record on loop. And you would just sit in there with different people all the time and melt into the couch.
And it felt kind of like a ceremony or something that we were doing together. And it was constant for at least a couple of weeks. It was like the Dream House, but with more notes.
“Midnight In A Perfect World” by DJ Shadow
This song deviates quite a bit from the rock subcultures and folk songwriting that have been discussed so far. How did you first encounter “Midnight in a Perfect World”, and why does it hold significance for you?
ANDREW BAILEY: I was in Bedford Hills, where the Clintons live now, I think. I had this really affluent friend of mine who was into cooler music because he could afford to buy all these CDs and figure out what was good or not. And he put me on to DJ Shadow.
It was when I was doing a lot of creative writing, so the first time we listened to him, he was saying, ‘I’ve got some trippy stuff that we can write to.’ And so we got stoned in his bedroom and listened to DJ Shadow and wrote. That was the idea. But I didn’t really write much because I was ‘Damn, this is what I like.’
I had never heard stuff like that before, that style of music, sample music with live drums over it. It was pervasive in popular culture my whole childhood, but I never heard it done in an artistic way, rather than a commercial way that was, I guess, trying to sell me shit. And so I was like, ‘What even is this?’ And I’m picturing a full band, somebody playing a keyboard and all these different vocalists and all this weird shit.
And that’s when I really learned what sampling is. Everything was samples except for the drums, because DJ Shadow was just a drummer, but he had access to this record store basement. He would go to this record store all the time, and finally, the dude that owned it was, ‘Bro, I see you buying the weirdest shit we have. Check out the basement.’ And so he had access to all these records that nobody else could get their hands on. And for years, nobody even knew what his sample sources were, some of them, anyway.
That got me to think of how the music I listened to was made, because I always listened to hip-hop, and I never really understood what was happening or what they were doing in the studio. Then, so this is when I was 14, I think, 15, that’s when I thought, ‘Oh, that’s what I want to do.’ But at the time, samplers were a thousand bucks or whatever, and it took me literally 20 years to get my first sampler because I was always broke.
Do you feel like you approach independently making music using a sampler in a way that differs to the way that you write guitar parts for DIIV?
ANDREW BAILEY: I would say that lately, my contributions to DIIV have been pretty much all samples. I’m not good at writing music, I get to take other people’s shit.
ZACHARY COLE SMITH: I would say, you have a really creative, unique approach to sampling that I’ve never really heard. Sampling takes a lot of creativity to change it from somebody else’s song into your own thing. And Bailey has these really idiosyncratic approaches to sampling, pushing on the tape machine or just messing with the wheel in this really chaotic and really musical way of doing it that I think is very unique.
COLIN CAULFIELD: I think that sampling requires some sort of sonic version of photographic memory. Someone will be listening to a drone loop, and they’ll be, ‘I know what will go with this.’ And you can’t imagine how they would know that. Bailey is like that with samples. We’ll have a song going and he’s, ‘I have something perfect for this.’ And it’s a three-second part of some weird tape that he pulls out, and I’m like, ‘How did you even remember that?’
Would you say that hip-hop is your main point of reference when it comes to making music?
ANDREW BAILEY: I mean, that’s what I listen to. Early on in DIIV, the parts that Cole was writing that I was playing on Oshin, they obviously didn’t sound like hip-hop, but it was still the same idea, because I would play the simplest little tune for the entire song. And that’s why I like hip-hop music, the instrumental side of it. It has such an intense restriction where you have to write a song that’s eight measures long that just will sound good looped over and over again.
It’s like writing a haiku but then having to read it over and over again and have it still be interesting. So thinking of guitar parts like that is cool I think.
“The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face” by Bert Jansch
You mentioned hip-hop being what you primarily listen to, but “The First Time I Ever Saw Your Face” is a classic folk song. What inspired this choice, and particularly the Bert Jansch version?
ANDREW BAILEY: I think it was written in the ‘50s, and then a bunch of folk artists did it. Bert Jansch, who is my favourite guitarist, did it. I picked that one because he’s the guitarist who had a big influence on how I play, sort of like the most unique version of what I play.
I was always like, ‘How do I play these songs?’ Because they sound so weird. I couldn’t picture what he was doing on the guitar to make those sounds. So then I started learning them. But they’re all finger-style, which is really complicated. I wasn’t very good at it, but then I realised that learning those songs is like playing video games.
It’s the same part of your brain where you start a level, you suck at it, and you die right away. But then the next play-through, you get up to that point, and you know how to get around that bad guy. Except on guitar, it’s where to put your finger to anticipate the next chord shape and stuff like that.
And then you get even further, and then you die again, and you start over. And it’s the exact same thing as playing a video game, except afterwards you get the ability to play a pretty song versus saving the princess or whatever. So whenever I find myself wasting time, I pick a Bert Jansch song and try to figure out how to play it and practice it over and over again so I beat the level. And that was the first one I did.
Some of the stuff he’s doing is these two whole-step hammer-ons, where most hammer-ons are just one step, so two frets, but he’s doing four frets, and I didn’t know you could do that, so I started writing all of these licks that had crazy things. It’s all over Nixon/Kato, a solo project I did a million years ago. I was just ripping off Bert Jansch.
I learned “The First Time I Ever Saw Your Face” to impress my father. He liked it a lot; he’s the one who put me on to Bert Jansch. He really likes that kind of stuff. So every time I learn a new one, I’ll send him a video, and he’ll say, ‘Man, I wish I could play guitar.’
I’ve learned a couple of Chopin songs, but I can’t get good at them enough, so I really can’t play them. And so those are always the final bosses, just sitting on my shoulder being like, ’You still haven’t beat this level yet.’ And every once in a while, you know, I get a day off, and I have a headache or something, I’ll just try to do that. “Opus 64” is really difficult, and one day I’ll be able to play it all the way through, but not any time soon.
Tackling a difficult piece of music with a headache sounds pretty intense.
Usually, it was when I was quitting cigarettes. I’ve quit cigarettes three or four times in my life, and each time I pick a really hard finger-style song to learn because it distracts you. It gives you the anxiety that you’re feeling from the withdrawal, and so you conflate the two, and you don’t care about the cigarettes as much.
I did that with “Never Going Back Again,” the Fleetwood Mac one. It’s a really hard finger-style song. Lindsey Buckingham is singing that shit while he’s playing this really intricate finger-style part. So that’s another final boss.
“Minipops 67 [120.2][Source Field Mix]” by Aphex Twin
This one also strays away from the rock and folk spheres. Aphex Twin also has such a massive discography, why is this track significant to you?
ZACHARY COLE SMITH: I feel we’ve had all of our picks in reverse chronological order in our lives, where there’s a story between the two. I grew up listening to rock music. I’ve always loved finding new music, I’ve loved listening to music, and it was very rock-focused. I saw electronic-based music as being this other world that I didn’t really understand.
Then I started a rock band, and sometimes people would mention these minimal electronic producers that were treading on similar grounds, arrangement-wise or composition-wise. And I understood what they were talking about, but it’s just been this really rock-oriented world.
When Syro came out - I can’t remember what year it was, but it was when the band already existed - I listened to it constantly. But it was the first time I really saw that I had seen this false dichotomy of rock music as this warm and human thing, and electronic music as this cold techno, technological thing.
“minipops 67 [120.2][source field mix]”, the first track on Syro, is the most human music I’ve ever heard. It’s so playful and organic, and it deconstructs music at such a more granular level. I think that my attraction to this German psychedelic music, krautrock stuff, comes from having loved the idea of deconstructing music form, but this is at a level where he’s just ripping apart sound waves to create new sounds.
And there’s a human voice on it, and it’s so bizarre, but it’s so fun and playful. And, to me, it feels very irreverent of musical history, but it feels like it comes from such a deep love of music that it sometimes makes me really emotional to listen to it.
It’s somebody who just loves music and loves making music so much, and can have fun making it in such a nuanced way. Every measure of the drumbeat, there’s something new. And with every evolution of the way a sound is constructed, it’s constantly falling apart and then turning into something new.
It completely changed the way that I thought about what music was, really. I had a much more rigid idea of what music could be made from. I was so late to the party with electronic music in general, but this record was a gateway for me that led to this five-year-long journey that I’ve been on, trying to understand what electronic music is and what music can be.
Did hearing someone dissect music in the way that Aphex Twin does allow you to start understanding the production of electronic music more?
Certainly. To me, in rock music, production is the last step. You have the song, and it feels like the icing on the cake. I always thought of it as being something really boring and technical, which it is in a sense, but production is somebody else’s job. We just write songs, and then the producer comes in. It’s this really boomer idea. But hearing that production can be this completely organic, playful composition tool is really cool. And you can hear it happening constantly over the course of the song.
The song, in a sense, is simple, but the production decisions, the sophistication of the rhythms, the textures, and the melodies that evolve and come in and out, are production and composition going hand in hand, which was a new idea to me. I think when music is your job, you can forget it is supposed to be fun. And it’s really cool to listen to somebody having fun making music.
There’s a longstanding debate about whether there are any lyrics in this song. As you became more familiar with the nuance of the track, did you develop your own interpretation?
I mean, you hear it differently all the time, but to me, it feels like mumbling of some kind. It feels really casual and low-stakes. And when we’re talking about sampling, I feel some producers look for the perfect thing to sample, but there’s a sample of his voice, or, I don’t know what it is, that feels all fucked up. And there are samples on that record that feel as though he walked into a random public space, just hit record on a tape recorder for five seconds, and took random sounds of whatever it was. And he built a song around it.
It feels fun to not be precious about the sounds that you’re making music from. I was watching this session breakdown with Jane Remover, who’s a producer in the US that I love. There are all of these sounds, and someone asks, ‘Oh, why do you pick these sounds?’ And they’re like, ’I literally just searched my computer for sound files.’
They had a video game on the computer that came with sounds as part of the game, and they showed up in the search window as sounds on their computer. So then they just dragged them in and used them. And I think it’s really a fun idea to just use whatever’s in front of you.
Do you feel that your approach to sound leans more playful or more precious?
It’s a learning process. We’re always learning stuff about music, but I think we were very precious at times with Frog. So it’s a good reminder that you don’t need to be.
I remember “#2” from Selected Ambient Works Volume II being the walk-out music at a couple of your 2022 shows. Do you feel that appreciation for Aphex Twin and electronic music is a shared thing among the band?
ZACHARY COLE SMITH: I think sometimes.
COLIN CAULFIELD: I feel like we all have a similar experience. I feel like with electronic music, unless you grow up going to those shows, it is something that you come to later. I think all of us have.
“Nagasaki Nightmare” by Crass
Crass managed to have a pretty significant impact not just within the UK, but also within punk and hardcore scenes in the UK. How did you get into that sort of sound?
ZACHARY COLE SMITH: When I was in eighth grade, there was this kid named Mike who moved from Canada, and everybody called him Crass. He just wore this one Crass shirt all the time. I was listening to shitty pop-punk bands. I knew Crass was a punk band, but I didn't know anything about them.
So I ended up becoming good friends with this kid, Crass, and he turned me on to Crass. We listened to it, and he had this CD that's called Best Before 1984. It had songs from different periods of their career, and it was the first time I'd heard such in-your-face, overtly political music.
There are moments of the most extreme blasphemy I've ever heard in music, especially on "Reality Asylum." You can listen to it, and it’s just pure blasphemy for three minutes. They’re an anarchist band, and they're a collective. “Nagasaki Nightmare” is really chaotic, and it was music I'd never heard before. It wasn't just chords and the beat going through. It has these crazy detours and insane baseline and sound collage stuff, but it's very in-your-face, confrontational, anti-authority music.
Until that point, the only rebellion I'd heard in music was 'I hate my parents' or something like that. This channelled that same type of anger of rebelling against authority, but it was so much more plain-spoken and direct. This is the music that radicalised me.
Frog In Boiling Water is your most outspoken, outwardly political work yet. Do you feel a sense of responsibility to maintain a political stance and speak out?
I mean, we aren't Crass, but I'm so grateful for that music being a political awakening for me in my life. I feel that for each person in this band, we can trace our political journey back to the music we're listening to and the messages in the music we're listening to. And it's cool to think that as a musician, you do have this direct line to people who may not have discovered their political identity yet. So there is some responsibility.
“Schizophrenia” by Sonic Youth
After expressing such diverse music tastes, what made “Schizophrenia” your collective group choice?
COLIN CAULFIELD: We were trying to figure out a song that all four of us like.
ZACHARY COLE SMITH: It’s very rare to find a song that all four of us like.
COLIN CAULFIELD: At the beginning of the tour, at a festival, all four of us actually watched Smashing Pumpkins play a whole set, which is rare, for multiple different reasons. And there was a moment where all four of us were nodding our heads, which made me so happy, because that never happens. We're never fully in agreement. But I mean, what do you say about “Schizophrenia”?
ZACHARY COLE SMITH: A lot of times when we're making records, we'll make these little playlists that are references to communicate an idea to each other. A lot of times, we'll shorthand stuff just through songs, and this is a song that's wound up on every album's reference list.
It's hard to pick a song that's especially emblematic of an artist, especially an artist that’s had such a massive and diverse discography. But I think that they're influential to the way that we approach music as a band, especially since they're a band with people contributing in their own way all the time. So I feel that’s a band reference that would make sense.
COLIN CAULFIELD: That song also has the ugly and beautiful thing. A lot of times, the sound of DIIV is all about ambiguity between a major and minor key or, or happy and sad. It's somewhere in the middle. And there's rarely a moment where it's all the way on one end of the spectrum. And Sonic Youth does that so well in their own way, especially that song. It has these movements, and each one gets progressively more longing and desperate-sounding, but the whole time, it's really melodic and accessible.
Also, in the documentary, 1991: The Year Punk Broke, about Sonic Youth on tour when Nirvana was opening for them, there's footage of them playing “Schizophrenia” at a festival, and it’s the coolest live footage I've ever seen. They just look so cool, it sounds amazing, and everyone is just being tribally hypnotised in the audience. It's so inspiring watching that and listening to “Schizophrenia”.
Sonic Youth do such a good job of making commercial-sounding music without compromising anything about what the music sounds like. There are a couple of songs that they have where you think, 'Oh, that's a pop song,' because of the way the drums sound, or how the beat is, but even those still sound fucked up. They still sound like Sonic Youth. I think they're a very inspiring band for us for multiple different reasons, but especially because they’re uncompromising.
ZACHARY COLE SMITH: We talked about Sonic Youth on the DIIV podcast, for like, three hours. We tried to cover their entire discography. It’s what killed the podcast.
Boiled Alive is out now
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