NAP EYES OPEN THE NEON GATE

 

Who guessed it? After releasing their first three new recordings in three years, the phenomenal, mercurial Nap Eyes have announced The Neon Gate, the remarkable and adventurous new album on which those songs appear. It’s out on October 18, and you can preorder it now, as well as listening to yet another new one, the picaresque “Passageway,” which juxtaposes an absurdist Middle Ages setting with concisely rendered quotidian details of journeys between earthly and cosmic planes … typical Nap Eyes stuff. (Thanks to FLOOD for sharing it.)

 

Preorder The Neon Gate

$9.00 – $35.00

This product has multiple variants. The options may be chosen on the product page

 

 

Listen to the First Four Singles, including “Passageway,” & Watch Visuals

The band’s 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.

 

 

Songwriter Nigel Chapman on “Passageway”:

I had the last verse of this song written for a long time, along with a bunch of earlier verses that I didn’t like as much that I eventually discarded. Eventually one quiet day when I was not doing too much of anything, I started to come up with the lyrics of the earlier verses—just in my head without an instrument or speaking them out loud, which is unusual for me. So the song was generated by this out-of-the-ordinary writing method, but I think this resulted in a song that is pretty different from anything else I’ve written to date. During the live tracking at our friend René Wilson’s home and studio, Brad was playing acoustic guitar in the stairwell, Josh and Seamus were playing in the main room, while I sang in an adjacent bedroom. 

 

 

  • 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

 

 

Photo by Josh Salter.

Acknowledgments

Masters of subtlety. – NPR

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. – Uncut

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

Few songwriters write about malaise with as much charm and empathetic chill as Nigel Chapman. – Aquarium Drunkard

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