(Photo by Louie Kovatch)

 

Somewhat quietly — which is a bit ironic, given its stormy history — DIIV has emerged as one of the best indie rock bands around, and certainly a standard-setter for the shoegaze subgenre. Perhaps only those storms, and five years between full-lengths, have kept the Brooklyn foursome from becoming one of indie rock’s heaviest of commercial heavy hitters. It’s certainly not a lack of songwriting chops or, lord knows, guitar hooks.

But DIIV has returned to the surface, and now, maybe the band can start climbing again. This Friday, their tour supporting their new and excellent fourth album, Frog In Boiling Water, will stop at Emo’s, where Austinites can witness the fruits of a full-band airing of grievances a year ago at Los Angeles’ Echo Park Lake. That meeting, according to a release from DIIV, addressed intraband relationships that were “fraying badly,” containing “suspicions and resentments, bruised egos and anxious questions, all fingerprints left by a quest that demanded DIIV grow both together and apart.”

Turmoil has long been a calling card of DIIV, from vocalist-guitarist Zachary Cole Smith’s 2013 drug arrest with Sky Ferreira in which Smith had “42 decks” of heroin, to his “long-haul inpatient treatment” stay in 2017, to former bassist Devin Rubin Perez’s offensive posts on the infamous far-right website 4chan in 2014 (Perez left the band in 2017). All of that preceded the wonderful full-length Deceiver in 2019, the last time DIIV was heard from for 40-plus minutes, and the home of next-level tracks like “Skin Game” (my #3 song of 2019), “The Spark” and “Blankenship,” the last containing one of the greatest, most distinctive guitar-hook zaps in the history of shoegaze.

But DIIV portrays Frog In Boiling Water as an arduously realized product of tension and perseverance, with producer Chris Coady, Smith and the rest of the band — Smith, guitarist Andrew Bailey, bass/keyboardist/guitarist Colin Caulfield and drummer Ben Newman — engaging in “existential debates about DIIV’s direction and how to get there.” It was the band’s cards-on-the-table Echo Park meeting at the beginning of June 2023 — where “They dropped the shields of professionalism that had let them work amid the rancor and allowed themselves to get mad and bummed, real and vulnerable” — that allowed the then-in-progress Frog In Boiling Water to become a finished product.

It’s a fascinatingly doomy one, for sure, dystopian and then some (sample lyric: “The rotating villains/Profit off suffering/A doomsday machine glitch/Is our new god/The banality of evil”). But it’s also another musically enthralling entry full of arresting melodies and deliberate strum and swirl, with standouts like “Raining on Your Pillow” and the title track ranking with the best of DIIV’s work to date. Seeing this fourth record become reality is a blessing that wasn’t a given, and neither is seeing this battle-tested foursome live and intact in Austin in 2024.

Doors open for Friday’s show at Emo’s at 7 p.m. and the show starts at 8 p.m. Scheduled openers are They Are Gutting a Body of Water and untitled (halo).