Happy Release Day to Nap Eyes.

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. Buy it, stream it, and watch the bonkers videos via the Dark Links below.

It’s been an absolute pleasure collaborating, hanging, and discussing records and books and science and philosophy with these lads over the years (Nigel currently has me reading Bernardo Kastrup on consciousness).

Like many things PoB, it’s a family affair—Tamara of The Weather Station first hipped us to the band and connected us with Steve of great Canadian label You’ve Changed Records. Gentle guru James Elkington produced and played on this album, shaping its new sweetness and sense of space. Our friends at Jagjaguwar are releasing it with Royal Mountain Records and some coaching from PoB cornermen. These people mean a lot to us. Please listen, please love each other.

This album is a JagJaguwar / Royal Mountain release, in partnership with Paradise of Bachelors. Please order from JagJaguwar or your favorite digital marketplace.

Buy via JagJaguwar

Buy or Stream Elsewhere

Snapshot of a Beginner is Nap Eyes’ most concentrated and hi-fi effort to date. Throughout the album, there’s an immediately noticeable leap in arrangement and muscle, one that still holds the raw, nervous energy and the earnest, self-deprecating poetry that make Nap Eyes an enduring cult favorite.

Almost all the songs of Nap Eyes are whittled into their final form from Chapman’s unspooling, 20-minute voice-and-guitar free-writing sessions. Each member — drummer Seamus Dalton, bassist Josh Salter and guitarist Brad Labelle — then plays a crucial role in song development, composing around the idiosyncratic structures and directing the overall sound and feel of the songs. To record, the band went to The National’s nuevo-legendary upstate NY Long Pond Studio, working with producers Jonathan Low (Big Red Machine, The National) and James Elkington (Steve Gunn, Joan Shelley), the latter of whom also did pre-production arrangement work with the band.