After teasing an apparent (and unlikely) appearance on an episode of Saturday Night Live hosted by none other than Limp Bizkit frontman Fred Durst, DIIV have paid off the joke with the video for their new song “Brown Paper Bag” and announced a tour in support of their upcoming album, Frog in Boiling Water.
Last week, the New York rock group shared a short clip filmed on what looked a lot like the famed SNL stage set, which even includes a winking nod to the show’s horn-heavy theme song. Durst then provides a nonsensical introduction: “Inter-dimensional or not? I don’t know. I’m the god-dang cosmic thunder lord and I’m here to present you the best show you’ve ever seen, and these guys are bad-ass.”
Durst reappears in the “Brown Paper Bag” video to welcome DIIV back to the SNL-ish set for a performance of the song, a sludgy slice of shoegaze with shades of My Bloody Valentine and Smashing Pumpkins. It’s followed by another fake ad for Soul-net, a corporate behemoth offering “transformative solutions for personal and societal issues.”
Although neither DIIV nor Durst have commented directly on the collaboration, the capitalist-skewering elements of these videos align with the themes of Frog in Boiling Water, which will be released May 24 on new label Fantasy Records.
“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,” the band say. “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.”
DIIV will return to the road beginning June 6 in Santa Cruz, Ca., and have dates on the books through an Aug. 7 hometown show at the soon-to-open Paramount in Brooklyn, N.Y.
Here are DIIV’s tour dates:
6/6 – Santa Cruz, CA – The Catalyst
6/7 – San Francisco, CA- Regency Ballroom
6/8 – Roseville, CA – Goldfield Trading Post
6/10 – Seattle, WA – Neptune Theatre
6/12 – Portland, OR – Revolution Hall
6/13 – Boise, ID – Treefort Music Hall
6/14 – Salt Lake City, UT – Metro Music Hall
6/16 – Denver, CO – Ogden Theatre
6/18 – Dallas, TX – Granada Theater
6/19 – Houston, TX – White Oak Music Hall
6/20 – San Antonio, TX – Aztec Theater
6/21 – Austin, TX – Emo’s
6/23 – El Paso, TX – The Lowbrow Palace
6/24 – Albuquerque, NM – Sunshine Theater
6/25 – Phoenix, AZ – The Van Buren
6/27 – San Diego, CA – The Observatory North Park
6/29 – Los Angeles, CA – Wiltern Theatre
7/15 – Philadelphia, PA – Union Transfer
7/16 – Washington, DC – Howard Theatre
7/17 – Richmond, VA – The National
7/19 – Charleston, SC – The Music Farm
7/20 – Orlando, FL – House of Blues
7/21 – Miami, FL – The Ground
7/23 – Tampa, FL – The Orpheum
7/25 – Atlanta, GA – Buckhead Theatre
7/27 – Milwaukee, WI – Turner Hall Ballroom
7/28 – Minneapolis, MN – First Avenue
7/30 – Chicago, IL – Thalia Hall
7/31 – Detroit, MI – Majestic Theatre
8/2 – Toronto, ON – The Concert Hall
8/4 – Montreal, QC – Osheaga Music and Arts Festival
8/5 – Boston, MA – Royale
8/7 – Brooklyn, NY – Brooklyn Paramount
