I’m not sure if much more can be said about frog. That’s not a bad thing — I’ve been writing about them for years and their output has been consistent, and consistently excellent. (You can read more about frog in this guest article by record label Audio Antihero’s Jamie Halliday.) frog’s entire jam is creating exquisite pop about watching the world from within your own little fishbowl, and GROG posits that this is a special kind of hell. In spite of the upbeat and luxe pop arrangements, the lyrics paint us a painful world of being on the outside looking in — and according to frog, that can be kind of fun.
GROG is all about stasis — perhaps the product of navigating fatherhood during lockdown and making sense of a world in which our leaders actively want us all to die. Light stuff! But for frog it’s those moments that truly illuminate the human spirit. The show-stopper here is “Black on Black on Black,” a luxuriant retelling of Odysseus’ captivity (or “captivity,” depending on the translation) by the witch Calpyso.
But that heady mix of paralysis and sex and just not getting the things you want is all over GROG, as the album closers “New Ro” and “Gone Back to Stanford” epitomize suburban yearning. If Kind of Blah is one of the best New York City albums I’ve heard, then GROG is about growing up in the suburbs of the only good city on this entire planet. (Full disclosure: I’m a sixth generation New Yorker.) If you could just reach out and touch all the goodness on the other side of the veil, maybe wasting your youth in subdivisions would make it all worth it. Or maybe the grass isn’t greener on the other side. Either way, you can still try to dance away the pain.