It was back in 2019 that the world last heard from Frog, the cult New York duo of brothers Danny and Steve Bateman. That was around the release of their well-received fourth album, Count Bateman, a record I described as a series of, “happy-sad slices of a life being led”. The subsequent years have been busy for songwriter Danny, seeing his twins born, an increasingly crazy job situation and a whole lot of good reasons for Frog to go onto the back burner. While work on the follow-up began in 2020, it was only earlier this summer that the mixing was wrapped on the album, which Danny suggests goes to, “places I didn’t know existed before I found them”. Back in October Frog reappeared with a new single, Black on Black on Black, the first taster of their upcoming album, Grog, due later this month on the semi-retired, but always wonderful Audio Antihero Records. With the album just weeks away, today Frog are premiering the second single from it, Maybelline.

Although spelt differently to Chuck Berry’s Maybellene, Frog’s titular protagonist certainly seems to share more than a passing resemblance, with her flair for risk-taking and questionable grasp of the road rules. While Chuck only seemed to scratch the surface though, Frog’s take digs deeper, asking what brought her to this point, “I’m gonna think about you now, when I get drinks and walk to town, the song it sinks beneath the sound, I’m gonna figure you out”. This generally more thoughtful take is perhaps emblematic of the shifting between decades, both in society and on a personal level, while the Rock’n’Rollers were full of youthful, often highly questionable abandon, the world has moved towards a more introspective way of existing, where the carefree thrills have consequences and questions to answer.

While the nature of raising twin children might have reduced the space for Frog in Danny’s life, it hasn’t stopped his creative juices from flowing, indeed if anything they seem to be overflowing from his unconscious, as he explains, “I dreamed that Bruce Springsteen was singing this song, like screaming it, and the whole thing was like fully formed. I woke up and I had to run to the bathroom to make sure that I could record the melody so I’d remember it, but I didn’t want to wake up my children or wife”. While he hasn’t managed to hang onto all of these hallucinatory moments, Danny explains this form of creativity has become quite common, “I dream a lot of music nowadays – it’s brutal when you can’t get it recorded fast enough to remember it because all the songs are so good”.

Musically, while it perhaps doesn’t go all the way back to the 1950s, Maybelline does have a certain classic-pop swagger, its choppy piano intro perhaps more Frankie Vallie than Chuck Berry, sounding a bit like the Whitney if they were playing at the best High School Prom you can imagine. As it progresses though the song’s sweet sheen starts to slip a little, and everything becomes a bit more ragged, the drums and piano start to race away from the vocal melody, before it breaks down to a chorus that melts away the good times into something quietly harrowing, “yes, yes they fucked it up they died they left him dead on a hillside, it’s with a special kind of pride you put on all those stars and stripes”. At that moment the track seems to shift, sliding into a darker place, like the soundtrack Elliott Smith might have written for True Detective. That sense of darkness looming is present throughout Grog, as Danny explains, “the whole thing is bathed in flames and the grooves are bubbling bubbling and the devil is a DJ smiling broadly”. Chalk Grog up as further evidence for the old adage, the devil has all the best tunes.

Grog is out November 17th via Audio Antihero. For more information on Frog visit https://linktr.ee/heyitsfrog.