Nap Eyes Share Two New Covers and Hit the Road with MJ Lenderman and the Wind In advance of their upcoming US tour with MJ Lenderman… Read More »Nap Eyes Share Two New Covers and Hit the Road with MJ Lenderman and the Wind
The video for this track, the first to follow the album’s release on October 18, finds songwriter Nigel Chapman—now having, perhaps, passed through The Neon Gate—wandering through a pastoral cemetery, a postmodern disciple of W.B. Yeats contemplating mortality and nature, and undercutting that self-serious persona in scenes goofing around and performing live with his three bandmates, Brad Lahead, Josh Salter, and Seamus Dalton.
Welcome, intrepid traveler; step through The Neon Gate. Today you can finally hear the entirety of the wild, fascinatingly kaleidoscopic new Nap Eyes record, their fifth and furthest out long-player. Today the band has also shared the fifth short visual, for the lead track “Eight Tired Starlings,” as well as a clutch of Spring UK and EU tour dates.
“Dark Mystery Enigma Bird” is the final pre-release single from Nap Eyes’ much anticipated forthcoming fifth album, The Neon Gate. This disjunctive avian fable told through a stream-of-consciousness narrative provides, with its sun-dappled surreality, perhaps the most immediate earworm melodies and arrangements on the record. The single is accompanied by an absorbing, technicolor hand-drawn animated video, as innocent as it is irreverent, created, through a painstaking process, by filmmaker Dr. Cool. It depicts a phantasmagorical tale of a truckload of wild zebras who commandeer the vehicle transporting them and set off on a fantastic adventure in a psychedelic landscape.
Nap Eyes’ adventurous new album The Neon Gate is out October 18. Preorder it today, and listen to the new single “Passageway,” featuring an accompanying visual.
Following their first new music in three years (“remarkable lyric writing” –FADER; “quietly devastating” –Exclaim), Nap Eyes presents a languorous adaptation of a phantasmagorical poem by Russian Romantic Alexander Pushkin (1799–1837). “Demons” depicts a perilous nocturnal journey by carriage, beset by eerie apparitions of uncanny but uncertain spectral nature. The band unravels the knotty verse into a fluid melody, gliding adeptly through the snow, observing the eldritch scene.
The first Nap Eyes song in exactly three years, the astonishing “Feline Wave Race,” which transports the listener from “outer space” to a “13th-century castle” and into the 1996 Nintendo game Wave Race 64, piloted by synths and drum programming, is more discursive and deconstructed, more abstract and nonlinear than anything they’ve attempted to date. “Ice Grass Underpass,” which singer, principal songwriter, and guitarist Nigel Chapman wrote in 2009, predates the band’s existence entirely but prefigures the sonic signature of Nap Eyes’s foundational first two albums.
Today—which is just another day and also, somehow, the edge of a dark precipice—Nap Eyes release their beautiful new record Snapshot of a Beginner into the world. It’s a record that asks deceptively big questions in deceptively small ways, which is a scale we need now.
In which the homie Brad Labelle, distinguished Nap Eyes shredder and lovely guy, discusses his favorite guitar solos, among which is mentor/producer/colleague James Elkington’s solo from “Late Jim’s Lament:
“His solo here is probably the best acoustic guitar solo I’ve ever heard. He’s an endlessly inspiring musician/person and I’m honored to have him as a mentor. You can also catch him ripping it up live in the Jeff Tweedy band.”
The mesmerizing video, directed by Antoine Lahaie, was inspired by films like Blade Runner and Under The Skin. Following their current dates with Destroyer, Nap Eyes will tour across Europe and North America in support of Snapshot of a Beginner.
