Cole Smith is sick of talking about shoegaze. When we speak, it’s a few days before his band DIIV releases their first album in five years, Frog In Boiling Water, but the singer-guitarist says he was tired of being asked about the genre after the second interview of this busy press cycle. There’s some irony there. 

Contrary to the band’s own aversion to inhabiting any one genre, DIIV’s first two albums, 2012’s droney, dilated Oshin and 2016’s tubular, motorik Is the Is Are, were commonly described as “shoegaze.” However, 2019’s stormy, fuzz-soaked Deceiver was the band’s way of purposefully embracing the form, fusing the rumbling chords of Starflyer 59 with the wooly textures of My Bloody Valentine. Now that they're firmly planted in that idiom—at a time when shoegaze is experiencing a historic spike in popularity, no less—DIIV have stepped outside of its increasingly blurry boundaries once again. Hushed, eerie, and laced with samples and creaky acoustic guitars, Frog In Boiling Water is an anti-capitalist concept record almost unrecognizable from DIIV’s early material. And Smith himself seems a lifetime removed from that era as well.

Seated in his bungalow-esque garage in Altadena, California, the 39-year-old has short, dyed-blond hair tucked under a ballcap and big, round glasses that sparkle in the glow of his computer screen. You’d be forgiven for not being able to ID him as the floppy-haired, baggy-clothed Brooklyn indie icon he was in the early 2010s, the period when Smith became something of a tabloid regular for his public struggles with substance abuse and his relationship with alt-pop singer Sky Ferreira. 

But that life is now two DIIV albums behind him. Smith’s been sober since 2017, and he and his wife, Dani, welcomed their first child last year. Today, you’re more likely to see Smith promoting his work with the United Musicians and Allied Workers than living some version of indie rock celebrity (though he’s still cool enough to have his wedding covered in Vogue). In 2024, DIIV are survivors of an era of underground rock music that feels increasingly quaint and distant in the time of exploitative streaming algorithms and unwanted AI integrations. But unlike so many of their peers who got left behind in the 2010s, either culturally or materially, DIIV’s explicit left-wing politics and warped shoegaze experiments make them feel more prescient today than they ever have. 

Speaking with a lit cigarette dangling between his fingers for most of the interview, Smith and I had a long, winding conversation about the deterioration of the internet, the insidious paradoxes of capitalism, the push and pull between futility and hope, and how Frog in Boiling Water—not just the music, but its supplementary videos and images—reflects all of that. We also, whether he liked it or not, talked about shoegaze.

I really liked how you guys began your album rollout—or whatever, this era of the band—by tricking your Instagram followers into thinking that you guys got hacked by a spammy wellness entity. How did you land on that esoteric presentation for this body of work? 

It’s funny that you hesitated to use the word “rollout,” because I agree, it’s such a cynical kind of industry term. Anything falls into it, and I guess that kind of is what it is, but I noticed the hesitation there and I feel like we kind of have the same [hesitation]. We had finished the record and didn’t have a label. So we kind of were like, well, hopefully that piece falls into place, but for now let’s leak our own song. So we were like, OK, well how do you leak a song in 2024? People used to really care about leaks and it feels like people don’t care anymore. We had the idea of building a website and kind of creating a little bit of a barrier. It’s kind of demoralizing to go to somebody and be like, “Please listen to my song.” If one of my friends makes an album and they're like, “Listen to my record,” it’s less appealing than me being like, “I really want to hear your record.” So we wanted to create just a little, tiny barrier. So you have to earn it or something. 

The whole record is examining either symptoms or root causes behind societal issues—capitalism, namely. And this one was kind of examining a symptom of losing yourself into the internet. Looking for explanations for why your life is terrible. Capitalism maintains itself by pointing at other things and being like, “That’s the reason your life sucks, it’s the guy over there.” So one unique symptom of that is online conspiracy culture. Conspiracies are real, but a lot of them aren’t. 

Specifically, we were examining these rabbit holes of flat-earth, present planet theory, which is popularized by David Icke. And it’s this really scary corner of the internet where people will completely lose themselves, but at the same time they’ll find meaning in their lives. It’s almost like religion, but it doesn’t really help them in the same way. So that's the subject matter of the song “Soul-net,” and so it made sense to go Web 1.0, conspiracy rabbit hole website, just this stream of consciousness information dump, very paranoid. We wanted to create this word salad version of that that really isn’t espousing any particular ideology except, “capitalism bad.” 

And all this rollout stuff, the normal rollout, the motions you go through, can feel really boring and bad. And this was a way for us to be doing work that felt really fun. We were laughing and having fun sending ideas back and forth, and finding references, going deep in the internet. And making our social media look hacked, making this website, making a sound collage that veils the song … It was a small ask. Click the link, one minute of weird collage, and then you have a song, which is the most that a musician can offer. 

I really like the website, but I also love the memes you posted on Instagram. “These 12 cute animals will melt your heart,” with a Lockheed Martin logo. Or “This one product can provide world peace instantly,” and it’s just eggs in a pan. I feel like you really captured the feeling of the spam ads at the bottom of The Pirate Bay. 

Totally. Yeah, that image of eggs came from a DMT subreddit where they were like, “Look how fucked up my eggs look,” and they look normal. The band does a podcast and we’ll just talk about shit, and one of the guys was talking about how making the Soul-net website was kind of like putting on the glasses in They Live, that movie. Everything started to have that absurdity. Some of them came from real ads, it felt real. And then as we were working on it, everything started to look like that and it was hard to take the glasses off. It’s like you’re seeing capitalism for what it is, and it’s so paradoxical.

I’ve been thinking about how using social media is a performance that covers up the seedy clickbait capitalism that's, like, the real internet. And all the “good” internet stuff we see is just painting over this dystopian reality. Obviously, you guys creating the Soul-net website and making these memes is a performance, but it almost feels like a more authentic reflection of our digital experience than a clean admat or a transactional, “Check out our link on Spotify” type post. 

Well said, that was definitely the intention. We were thinking a lot about this idea of post-internet, or dead internet. Think about your mailbox or your phone. I don’t check my mailbox being like, “I wonder if I got a letter.” It’s just full of fucking garbage. And I’m like OK, I’ll add this to the basket next to my fireplace that I’ll never burn. And if your phone rings you’re not like, “Oh, somebody’s calling me.” It’s, “spam likely.” It has made those systems of communication almost obsolete. And so I really am fascinated by the idea that, as the internet becomes filled and clogged with this bullshit, it could have the effect of killing the internet and [humanity] returning to monkey. I really am fascinated by that idea and am hopeful of that as a potential future. 

I absolutely agree. Especially with the past year—even the past week, when Instagram added AI into the search function. I recently got my Paypal hacked, and finding verifiable information about what to do about that, it was so hopeless. It literally made me feel like the internet is not even a functional tool anymore. 

Or looking up a recipe. It’s like, “My grandma used to make spaghetti which I would put in my mouth and chew with my mouth.” It’s like, yeah, I know, just tell me how many tablespoons. AI is such a buzzword and there’s so many implications of it, but it feels like a thing that everybody wants to incorporate. We wanted to incorporate some AI stuff into what we were doing but not really like … I think it can be an interesting tool for very specific applications. Finding out how to write an Excel algorithm, that's what my wife uses it for. But we didn’t want to lean into the aesthetics of it or make, like, a Washed Out music video. That shit is so stupid to me, but it reflects this kind of dystopian thing that we wanted to incorporate. So we were really deliberate about how to use it as a tool. Like, deep-faking ourselves, which is kind of an absurd idea. Because it would’ve taken way less time to actually say the thing. Just kind of hint at it a little bit but not really lean into the aesthetics of it because it feels way too timestamped. 

Yeah, use it to expose its flaws, not to endorse its creative purpose. 

Yeah, exactly. 

If it’s difficult for me to navigate this digital wasteland, it must be so much more difficult to produce creativity on it. Or promote a band. 

It is. I don’t like it at all. But it kind of created these avenues where it’s like, OK, this is an avenue, how do we be creative within that? And each one presented an opportunity, and I'm not saying it’s good. But we tried to use it as some kind of opportunity. Like, thank god Universal Music Group, who distributes our music, doesn’t allow it on TikTok, so that was something we didn’t have any pressure to engage with. But Instagram, Twitter, all the avenues, we wanted to explore the potential for using some kind of creativity within it and bring the aesthetics, or the underlying way the thing works, into the art. In a way, it allowed us to do more. But obviously I would rather just put out music. It gave us space to flesh out this world after the album kind of already existed. 

In a broader sense, how do the day-to-day logistics of being a band in 2024 compare to, say, 2016? Before all the AI stuff. How meaningfully different does it feel to you? 

Liz Pelly’s written a lot about the streaming economy and how it devalues music. And that, for us, is the most sinister element of it. Where you have the history of all recorded music on your phone for $10, and you’re like, OK, well I get a million albums for ten bucks, I do the math and this album is worth one cent, or something. I think making a living off of music is the most difficult it’s ever been. Just all the pathways to any financial feasibility are being stripped away. Whether it’s Live Nation with the live thing, kind of a monopoly there. Spotify’s monopoly. 

Do you feel like you have to work harder to break through the noise on the internet? 

Yeah, totally. Luckily the work we’ve been doing around this, the videos and the websites, are fun for us. So we’re willing to put in many hours of unpaid labor towards it. And it feels like an art project and we’re making something larger. But there is an element of, you have to not even just work harder, but you do have to find ways to be creative. And I don’t know if our approach worked. We did it, so I feel like we have to work harder because that's how I justified the fact that we already did it. And hopefully it works. It’s hard to speak for musicians in general, but it definitely feels more difficult to cut through. 

And that reminds me of the SNL parody music video you guys did for “Brown Paper Bag.” Those traditional channels for promotion that bands would use, an institution like SNL, are just so out of grasp for so many bands these days. Traditional music publications don’t exist, or they don’t exist in the same way they did. I would be throwing my hands up if I was a band in your guys’ position and be like, where do we even go? 

It’s a really powerless feeling. Because even in 2012 it was like, “OK, we want Pitchfork’s attention.” When we were pitching the SNL video idea to the label I thought they were just gonna be like, “Absolutely not. You cannot do that.” And they were like, “Oh, well that might alienate SNL.” And it’s like, who fucking cares? That's not real. It also was funny announcing it and using the way that SNL and artists who perform on SNL roll out their performance, using that as raw material to make our deconstructed [version]. My aunt or my mentor from middle school were like, “Congratulations on SNL!” And it felt kind of bad but also, it reminded me that in their era, bands like the Replacements were on SNL. It was an institution that was promoting music, and so for it to be so out of reach for a band like us is fine, we don’t care. 

Then when you talk about music publications and journalists, and watching these publications get absolutely gutted, then when you’re looking at institutional support you’re like, Oh the only institutional support is a computer program algorithm that's Spotify’s proprietary thing that they're selling. That's who we have to impress? It feels really powerless. So looking at that you’re like, OK what do I have control over? And the only thing we have control over is what we make, so the rest is just out of our control. 

And you might as well at this point just lampoon these institutions. Because if you’re not gonna access them anyway, and they don’t really serve any real cultural function, they just preserve the upper echelon of artists … I see the parallel to the journalists who started “The New York War Crimes,” where they were basically like, “Fuck the New York Times, why would I even aspire to even write for this rag at this point? We might as well just try to torch it.” Creative people are kind of reaching this limit where these things have basically already ceased to exist. All the credibility is gone. 

They're just bastions of neoliberal monoculture. They hold no importance except to maintain the status quo. So if we’re addressing the status quo in a sense, that just feels like a fair target. I mean, have you watched SNL anytime in the last couple years? 

No. 

You should just check one out, it’s literally unwatchable. It’s propaganda. It’s insane. 

The cultural turnover rate seems quicker than ever, but regardless you guys have had a sustainable career for a long time now. It’s been almost 15 years. There’s only so many acts from 2011 who never had a mainstream crossover that are still active. What do you think has enabled DIIV to have this sustainability that it has to this day? 

That's a hard question to answer. We have theories, and it always feels, maybe less so now that the album is starting to come out and there’s a little bit of attention, but it feels like you could just lose it at any second. Sometimes it can feel independent from the quality of the music. But I think talking about what we can control and what we can’t, the main thing we try to do is make the best album we can. Even though the amount of time spent on this record was detrimental to us in a number of ways, personally and as a band, the record has to be the best it can be. And we feel that pressure every time. 

The first record is like, “It has to be this statement of purpose. You only get one first record.” And then the second is like, “Well, a lot of bands from this buzzy class of 2012 era didn’t make it past their second record.” So there’s a lot of pressure there. And then the third record was like, “OK well now the buzz band pressures are gone, now it’s a new pressure of proving ourselves.” And this one also felt like a make-or-break thing. And I think it’s always gonna feel like that. So I guess what I can say is we just work really hard on the records? 

Yeah, and I’d say that making great music has certainly helped keep DIIV sustainable. You said making this record was detrimental personally to you guys. How so? 

I was saying how we basically couldn’t tour for a while since we were making the record. It takes longer, which means it costs more. That's more time we aren’t touring, working. And then I think because of that, the relationship of the band … Where it’s your job, but it’s also your livelihood. It’s also your creative outlet. The band is like your family but they're your friends. All our lives are intertwined in so many different ways that every decision we’re making, all of those pressures are a part of it. 

So if you’re just being like, “The snare drum is too quiet, we need to turn it up,” you’re thinking about all that stuff at once and we’re arguing about songs and all these things. I would say personally in terms of our ability to have stability … I don’t have a college education, I don’t have trade skills. We put all of our eggs in this basket and if the future of it is uncertain as the institutions erode, then all we can do is try as hard as we can, so at least we tried. All of that pressure creates a lot of uncertainty. Economic uncertainty and existential “What are we doing?” stuff. And over years it can be damaging to our sense of self or purpose. 

Was there a point between Deceiver and Frog In Boiling Water where you considered calling it quits? Or did it never get to that point? 

We definitely never talked about, “What if we just quit?” But the process started to become so tangled that it felt like we were never … A big struggle for the band was decision making. Especially as decisions became permanent. When you’re making music you’re making decisions all the time, but then there would be decisions that felt permanent. Like, OK we’re actually writing the song, we’re not just throwing ideas into the computer. And so as those decisions started to get made there was a lot of conflict, and some of them just felt unresolvable, fundamentally. Even though there wasn’t an option of “Let’s just quit,” there also didn’t feel like an option of “Let’s finish the record.” It felt unresolvable at a bunch of different junctures. 

I read somewhere that the writing was more collaborative on this record than previous ones. It sounds like it was difficult to manage so many ideas, but ultimately did it make you guys stronger coming out the other side? 

I don’t know. But it was kind of an idea from early on: “Let’s make the structure of the band like the world we want to see.” Even playing field, no hierarchy. And there’s mythology around it, too. Like, how did four 17-year-old kids in their parent’s basement make Spiderland? There’s gotta be something there. I think early on I made the decision to just completely remove any sense of hierarchy or leadership. And in some ways it was detrimental, and in some ways it was beautiful because I got to watch my bandmates blossom as songwriters. 

The first Depeche Mode record was one songwriter, and then he left the band and all of the sudden, Martin Gore had to be the main songwriter. And he had one album, A Broken Frame, where he’s figuring it out, and then the third record, Construction Time Again, is an absolute masterpiece. And we might never have seen Martin Gore as a songwriter if there wasn’t space made for him. So it can be so beautiful. But it’s just difficult to make decisions as a group. Everybody has different ideas and intentions, and those ideas and things are constantly changing. 

Do you think you personally could’ve given up that control earlier on in DIIV’s career? Did you have too much ego then? How much intentional work did you have to put in to chip away at the front person ego that naturally builds up with someone in your position? 

Yeah, the first two albums, there was definitely ego involved. And then the stuff in my personal life between the second and third record, where I basically had to do the work to destroy that. And to crack it apart. So when we got to Deceiver I think the intentions were to open it up more, but I just felt more confidently in the band. But there were way more discussions, we kind of took baby steps and with Deceiver took more of a step towards making collaborative music. But there was still a bit of hierarchy in decision making, and then I kind of was like, “Well, I don’t want that.” 

This is a very weird coincidence, but I was reading an old Pitchfork interview with you, and it ends with you guys playing a show on your birthday. And it didn’t seem like a very good birthday for you. But I saw you guys last year in Pittsburgh on your birthday as well.

Right, it was my birthday. In McKees Rocks. Yeah that was cool, that was with Full Body 2, who I love. I really love Jeremy Gordon as a writer and that piece, to me, is kind of so embarrassing. But I think he’s a good writer so it’s a compelling piece, looking at it objectively. But some of those old ones I’m just like, “Jesus Christ.” 

Understandable. If you were to compare where you were at on the 2023 birthday versus the 2016 birthday, was the 2023 one a better birthday show? 

It’s funny how when you’re reading about artists, you kind of have this monolithic view of them as these unchanging people. And you see them in fits and starts where every couple years there’s an album, and you don’t really think of it in the way you think of other people in your life, or yourself. Where you’re just constantly changing, constantly in flux. Hardships, setbacks, growth. [There were] a lot of changes in my life pretty immediately after that article. That article was 2016, my birthday’s November, and then in January 2017 I checked myself into rehab. Got sober through inpatient treatment, outpatient treatment, sober living houses, programs with recovery, all the things in that was so long and full of a profound journey. And now I’m seven years sober, I’m married, I have a one-year-old, I moved. Some of that old stuff feels like watching a different person. 

The past is unchangeable, it’s written in stone. So it’s something you have to acknowledge and always come to terms with because you can’t change it. But it does sometimes feel, even though it’s not, like a different person. 

Just from my outsider’s perspective it feels like a world away. You personally, but also the band. The evolution creatively of the band between the first two records and Deceiver, and then up to the new one, you guys have gone in so many different directions. In terms of Deceiver being such a musically dark record, your heaviest one, did you have an idea for what you guys wanted to do after that record? 

I remember driving Colin [Caulfield, bassist] home from the last day in the studio and it really felt like when we were in the studio, things were working so well and it felt so good to finally get [Deceiver] recorded. And I remember driving him home and being like, “We should just do that again. Do this exact same thing again.” And that really was kind of the mindset up until we were on tour for that record in Europe and COVID lockdown started happening. We flew home and the whole institution of rock … You picture a rock band, you’re in a room together playing music, and there’s an audience. And it was so decontextualized and absurd, that idea, that it completely shifted our direction and our mindset and what we wanted to make and what felt possible. 

This new set of songs are, temperamentally, some of your most trance-inducing yet. Do you recognize the relationship between the way the music sets your mind at ease and the sort of capitalist hypnosis you guys are commenting on with Soul-net and the memes? 

The book where the Frog In Boiling Water idea comes from, he talks about that trance. I think he calls it a stupor, where the water warms up and you’re comfortable in it, and you enter the stupor. It had not crossed my mind about the trance-inducing side of the music. Which I think is a really cool aspect of it. I think musically we didn’t want to just make this hyper-blackpilled record. As somebody who was about to become a parent when we were making it, there were these profound mental gymnastics I had to do to even entertain the idea of wanting to have a kid. It came down to not just surrendering to the void, and trying to build meaning in my own life. Everybody’s life needs meaning. 

On the record there’s meaning and there’s hope. Some of it is false, whether it’s the accelerationist character in “Everyone Out” or the paranoid internet conspirator guy on “Soul-net.” It ends with a hopeful line: “We can leave this prison.” So the hopeful element was a key theme, and we really wanted to have that in the music, too. People are so complex and often have feelings that are completely at odds with each other, so I always love music that is happy and sad at the same time. Less so the trancey, droney thing, which I think early on in the band was really important. That Spacemen 3 record, Taking Drugs to Make Music to Take Drugs To. In the genesis of the band, we were like, “That’s it.” And I think it carried over, but obviously we have different intentions for it [now].

Speaking of the dichotomy of hope and fatalism, there was one post, I’m not sure if this is also a lyric, where you posted the title-track “Frog In Boiling Water,” it also has the duel acronym, “Freedom In a Boundless World.” You’re exposing the hopeful side, as opposed to dying in a boiling pot of water. 

In the overarching meta-narrative we’ve been building, the FIBW is this radical group that's at odds with the Soul-net corporation, which represents capitalism itself. We all were texting back and forth these acronyms for FIBW that would fit an anarchist or anti-capitalist collective. We had fun with that. 

Kind of bouncing around here, but I like that you guys are touring with a bunch of amazing bands this summer. They Are Gutting a Body of Water, Full Body 2, Glixen, a lot of the young shoegaze bands defining this era of shoegaze. Do you feel like you relate more to this era of shoegaze compared to whatever epoch of shoegaze existed when DIIV was first starting? 

Yeah, totally. For me, it’s so exciting to see these young bands who are taking a genre that's been pretty thoroughly explored, and are finding new ways to make that kind of music. Like, Emilie Friedlander’s podcast you were on with Ben, where you guys were talking about that class of new songwriters who are exploring these textures and all this stuff. It’s really fun for us to see, you get to see the avenues for where you can be progressive within the genre. 

I feel like probably the second day of this press cycle we were so sick of talking about shoegaze, but we also want to be a part of the zeitgeist thing that's happening. So it’s a difficult line to walk. For us, bringing bands that we really like and are excited by on tour [is great] because we can watch a show as a viewer, and then we get to play. It doesn’t feel like just going to work. I remember being so excited about music and exploring new things and thinking about it all the time. Which we still do, but I think we’re a bit more jaded or cynical, or it’s our job. So talking to the people in Full Body 2 it’s like, “Wow, you guys are excited, you’re onto something, it seems like it’s going good.” It’s a really great energy to be around. 

And we want to contextualize ourselves a bit in the thing. If you go to Spotify and it’s like, “Similar Artists,” and it’s like Real Estate. It’s like, are you fucking kidding me? I think that we do have work to do in order to be a part of the conversation. Literally every band we’re bringing on tour are bands that I and multiple [DIIV members] actually listen to, so it’s exciting for us. When Depeche Mode brings us on tour, it’s not because they want to sell tickets. The tickets already sold out. They're doing the thing they’ve always done, which is defining themselves by who does their remixes, who supports the tour. So that's kind of what we’re doing, too. 

At the very least it shows that you guys are tapped in, and you’re not just touring with people from your era. 

Real Estate [Laughs]. 

[Laughs] But really, there’s not that many bands from your age group who are bringing younger artists on tour in the way you guys are. But also, just in terms of your politics. There’s just not that many indie bands from the early 2010s who are as transparently anti-capitalist as you guys are. Between your work in the United Musicians and Allied Workers, or signaling your support for Palestine on social media. To speak a little generationally now, do you feel like the peer bands you came up with are right there with you? Or do you feel like some of them have dropped off and settled into complacency? 

I’m curious to know. It is a thing that people do when their material conditions are fine, they're just like, “OK, status quo is fine with me.” I think that maybe other bands from our class of bands probably might’ve had more financial avenues to make money. I think we burned a lot of bridges in our early days, and people didn’t want to work with us. So maybe it’s just because we don’t have a lot of money. 

We did a tour with Sword II, an incredible band from Atlanta. We feel that our politics are extremely far left. We sometimes feel like we don’t have as much political overlap with our peers as we’d want to. And then we did this tour with Sword II and I was like, “Damn, you guys are setting up shows with generators at Stop Copy City.” They handed out pamphlets to us about Cop City, the police training compound being built in Atlanta. All of a sudden I felt like, “Man, we should be doing more.” We feel like they're more radical than us, which I didn’t even know if we knew was possible. 

There’s the Twitter discourse, like, “shoegaze is apolitical.” And it’s like, sure, I guess. But everything is political. It’s all we talk about, and I think it’s a privilege to ignore that. So I think that maybe other artists from our generation are more willing or more able to exercise that privilege. And it’s just not something we’re interested in, I guess? 

Like you were saying, there’s hope in the record. Where are you finding hope day-to-day these days? 

For me, it’s family. My son. It’s the micro. And I think the record finds hope at a macro level. The last track is a really zoomed-out, macro-level hope that “none of this fucking means anything.” And there’s hope in that. But for me, it’s family. I’m really grateful that I get to be creative and do all this stuff, but at the end of the day, it’s really just about my family and my son. Just the little moments. That's the most I can ask for, and I’m thrilled by it. 

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.