Nap Eyes will release their new album, Snapshot of a Beginner, on March 27th via Jagjaguwar / Royal Mountain, in partnership with Paradise of Bachelors. Today, the band shares the third single/video, “Mystery Calling,” and expands their North American tour. It follows lead single “Mark Zuckerberg” and “So Tired,” which “has the feel of a long sigh on a languid summer day, albeit a pretty gorgeous sigh” (Stereogum). “Mystery Calling” opens with drifting guitar and meanders with gentle percussion. Frontman Nigel Chapman elaborates on the track below:
“This is another improvised-origin song. On one level it’s basically a description of my homebody ways, and it’s also about the way our mundane routines can seem to pull us away from what I’m referring to as ‘Mystery’ in the song– that is, away from the discovery and creation that seem to be more valuable and important activities in themselves, despite being deemed superficially ‘non-practical.’ Now, this irritation and sense of being drawn away from what’s important is probably mostly illusory. This is because the cosmic mystery is probably accessible even in the midst of the most boring and stressful busywork. At the same time, as any good procrastinator should know, there is quite a lot of good that comes from letting the mind ignore apparently pressing worldly activities in order to let it roam, explore, discover and create.”
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 favourite.
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 Loughead — 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.
Website | Jagjaguwar | Bandcamp | Instagram | Twitter | Facebook
