NAP EYES RELEASE MINDBLOWING “DARK MYSTERY ENIGMA BIRD” VIDEO AND SINGLE

 

 

“Dark Mystery Enigma Bird” is the final pre-release single from Nap Eyes‘ much anticipated forthcoming fifth album, The Neon Gate (out October 18). 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. Unlike most vocals on The Neon Gate, which were recorded live with the band, songwriter Nigel Chapman recorded his vocals for “Enigma Bird” in a blanket-draped children’s cardboard castle in his parents’ basement.

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.

 

 

According to the director, Dr. Cool:

“All my vids are first inspired by the song. I knew as soon as I heard this squiggly, blissed-out summer jam that it was gonna be fun to animate to and match the vibe. It was actually the perfect song to hear for three months straight, so thanks, Nap Eyes! I think that if you’re in the right state of mind, this song could make you shed a single tear, so I hoped to make a video that would get someone to shed a second one. Not like a sad tear, but the kind that you get from staring into the sun on the last day of spring break. With that in mind I decided to focus on animating blasts of sunlight and depicting what a day feels like when it all goes your way despite a few twists in the road.”

Nap Eyes’ songwriter Nigel Chapman says:

“As you’ll see in the video, Dr. Cool’s imagination is intensely vivid and, perhaps it’s all right to say, mind-blowing. We are very lucky for this chance to collaborate with him, and grateful for the huge determination and patience it must have taken to create this powerful story from out of nothing, and fuse it to the ‘Enigma Bird’ song. For us it’s beautiful and moving to participate in this creation.”

 

 

Nap Eyes’ metamorphic fifth long-player collects a cache of nine fascinating songs recorded over the four years since Snapshot of a Beginner. The Neon Gate reveals classic touchstones (the uneasy interplay of physics and philosophy, perambulatory meditations, self-interrogating soliloquies, apertures of surreality, video games), but also evidence of divergent impulses toward nonlinear abstraction and longform improvisational composition (resulting in their most discursive, deconstructed, and deliquescent songs to date) and narrative and lyric formality (including adaptations of thorny poems by Alexander Pushkin and W. B. Yeats), imparting the sense that Nap Eyes have transmuted, as has their understanding of what a song is, what it can do, where it might go.

Read more about the album here.

 

Upcoming Performances

April 30, New York at Brooklyn Steel with MJ Lenderman – tickets

 

 

Preorder The Neon Gate

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Listen to the First Four Singles, including “Dark Mystery Enigma Bird,” & Watch Visuals

 

 

 

• Deluxe LP edition features a high-gloss jacket, full-color printed inner sleeve with lyrics and additional artwork, and 140g black vinyl.
• Deluxe CD edition features a gatefold jacket with replica LP artwork and a lyrics insert.
• RIYL: Yo La Tengo, MJ Lenderman, The Reds, Pinks, & Purples, The Only Ones, Swell Maps, The Modern Lovers, Felt, The Clean, The Verlaines, The Chills, The Go-Betweens, Kurt Vile, Courtney Barnett, Belle and Sebastian, all things Lou Reed.
• Artist page/bio/tour dates/links/back catalog

 

Acknowledgments

The Neon Gate finds Nap Eyes adopting new forms and expanding—these are among Chapman’s most empathetic and charmed compositions yet. – Aquarium Drunkard

Fripp-esque sustain, synths, and drum machines color a beautifully constructed record that brings to mind Aztec Camera’s High Land, Hard Rain or Scritti Politti’s Songs to Remember. – Uncut

A remarkable accomplishment. – Stereogum

The poem’s narrative nature fits perfectly into the realm the Nova Scotians have crafted; they’ve crafted this stunning elegance, almost as if it was meant as part of some ancient folk symphony. Nigel’s voice, like a moth to the flame … pulls you into the storytelling. Very few acts are crafting music in this matter, so feel free to raise your glass to these lads. – Austin Town Hall

Clean, tightly wound power pop that places Chapman’s remarkable talent for lyric writing front and center. – The FADER

 

 

Quietly devastating … a beautifully patient reintroduction to the group. – Exclaim!

Slow blooming bliss … worth the wait. – Raven Sings the Blues

Masters of subtlety. 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

[Snapshot of a Beginner] feels as much a modest masterpiece as [The Go-Betweens’] Spring Hill Fair or [Belle and Sebastian’s] Tigermilk. What sets them apart is the fear and trembling in Nigel Chapman’s reedy monotone and guitarist Brad Loughead, who unleashes the full Verlainian screaming bluebird repertoire. – Uncut

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

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