NAP EYES: I’M BAD NOW (PoB-033)

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New year, new Nap Eyes—and not a moment too soon. Today NPR Music has premiered “Every Time the Feeling,” the first single from their new record I’m Bad Now, with a lyric video featuring various Nova Scotian vistas and critters.

The acclaimed Canadians’ ambitious, allusive third album achieves a new sonic clarity, depth, and range to match the effortless melodies and extraordinary writing. It’s the band’s most transparent and personal set of songs to date, in which singer Nigel Chapman interrogates social, psychological, and spiritual milieus for clues about the elusive nature of knowledge.

I’m Bad Now constitutes the third chapter of an implicit, informal trilogy that includes Whine of the Mystic (2015) and Thought Rock Fish Scale (2016) (both now on sale for 20% off when you use coupon code BADNOW during checkout on our website).

The brilliantly reductive title is something I’ve heard my four-year-old son and his friends announce verbatim when roleplaying the perennial game of heroes and villains, “good guys” and “bad guys.” “I’m bad now,” he declares, but an equivocal binary is implied: it’s only a matter of time or trading places before he (or anyone) has the capacity for good again. Perhaps goodness will manifest in the multiverse, on a different circuit than this faulty, frayed one. Is that faith or fantasy? And what is the difference?

Album opener “Every Time the Feeling” arrives with a subdominant chord and a subdominant attitude, only switching to the first person in the (repeated) final verse, for this devastating admission:

Oh I can’t tell what’s worse:
The meaninglessness or the negative meaning
But I figured out a way
To get on with my life and to keep on dreaming

While Nigel composes Nap Eyes songs in their inchoate form at home in Halifax, Brad Labelle (lead guitar), Josh Salter (bass), and Seamus Dalton (drums), who live a twelve-hour drive away in Montreal, augment and arrange them, transubstantiating his skeletal, ruminative wafers into discourses that aim to transcend what Nigel self-laceratingly deems “bored and lazy disappointment art.” The band provides ballast and bowsprit to Nigel’s cosmical mind. The nautical metaphor is not just whimsy: Nap Eyes are all Nova Scotians by raising and temperament, acclimated to life on an Atlantic peninsula linked narrowly to the rest of North America. Brad is a physical guitarist whose lyrical grace is matched only by the dark ferocity of his feedback-laced solos, while Salter and Dalton exercise an unassuming mind-meld melodicism and vigor with their gentle thrumming.

Nap Eyes will tour North America and Europe this spring in support of I’m Bad Now, starting with a record release show in their adopted hometown of Montreal. A full list of dates is below.

Contingent on manufacturing schedules, we will ship your pre-ordered album approximately a week in advance of the March 9, 2018 worldwide release date. All pre-orders include an immediate 320k MP3 download of lead single “Every Time the Feeling”. 

Additionally, for the first time in PoB history, you will have the option of ordering the album on colored vinyl. There will be a limited edition of 600 deluxe copies of I’m Bad Now pressed onto pink vinyl; this is a one-time pressing.

For digital-only preorders, please visit Bandcamp (which also offers uncompressed, high-resolution audio files) or your favorite digital marketplace.

I’m Bad Now is also available via You’ve Changed Records (in Canada) and Jagjaguwar (in the rest of the world).

ACCLAIM FOR NAP EYES

“In just four short years, Nap Eyes have made much ado about meaninglessness with rock ‘n’ roll songs that shake just offbeat and smart lyrics wrapped in bemused ennui.” – NPR Music

“Brimming with passion & protest. Immediately familiar, yet bracingly distinct… one the most intriguingly idiosyncratic lyricists this side of Dan Bejar.” – Pitchfork

“One of the best rock bands in business today.” – The FADER

One of the most fascinating songwriters we have today. – Newsweek

“Purveyors of beatific, sun-drenched roadtrip tunes. Nigel Chapman is owner of one of the most beautiful voices I’ve heard in years.” – NME

“Unvarnished diarizing in lean, art-pop songs.” – Uncut

“Concise, understated alt-rock with cryptic, literate lyrics for Go-Betweens/Bill Callahan fans.” – MOJO

RIYL The Only Ones/England’s Glory, The Modern Lovers, Felt, The Clean, The Verlaines, The Go-Betweens, Bedhead, Kurt Vile, Courtney Barnett, Nikki Sudden, Belle & Sebastian, all things Lou Reed.
Use Coupon Code BADNOW for 20% Off Previous Nap Eyes Records

NAPS IN NORTH AMERICA

NAPS ABROAD

Mon. April 30 – Copenhagen, DK @ Ideal Bar at Vega
Tue. May 1 – Aarhus, DK @ TAPE
Wed. May 2 – Berlin, DE @ Monarch
Thu. May 3 – Hamburg, DE @ Hafenklang
Fri. May 4 – Amsterdam, NL @ Paradiso (upstairs)
Sat. May 5 – Cologne, DE @ King Georg
Sun. May 6 – Gent, BE @ Dok
Mon. May 7 – Paris, FR @ Supersonic
Tue. May 8 – London, UK @ Oslo Hackney
Wed. May 9 – Birmingham, UK @ Hare And Hounds
Thu. May 10 – Glasgow, UK @ Hug & Pint
Fri. May 11 – Manchester, UK @ Soup Kitchen
Sat. May 12 – Brighton, UK @ Prince Albert

Olaf Stapledon, 1886-1950.

For those of you who dig Olaf Stapledon, you’ll want to read the whole story.

“In one inconceivably complex cosmos, whenever a creature was faced with several possible courses of action, it took them all, thereby creating many distinct temporal dimensions and distinct histories of the cosmos. Since in every evolutionary sequence of the cosmos there were very many creatures, and each was constantly faced with many possible courses, and the combination of all their courses were innumerable, an infinity of distinct universes exfoliated from every moment of every temporal sequence in this cosmos.”

― Olaf Stapledon, Star Maker (1937)