Nap Eyes will release their new album, Snapshot of a Beginner, on March 27th via Jagjaguwar / Royal Mountain, in partnership with Paradise of Bachelors, and today they share the second single, “So Tired.” The introspective tune follows the “crunchy and echo-laden guitars” (Stereogum) of lead single “Mark Zuckerberg” and similarly showcases Snapshot of a Beginner’s elevated fidelity with the addition of piano, organ and synthesizer to the band’s usual guitar, bass and drum arrangements. Like many of the songs on the new album, “So Tired” was written in an improvised recording session before being fleshed out by the band.
Frontman Nigel Chapman, who addresses himself in the second person at the beginning of the song, explains the track further:
“The ‘So Tired’ refrain marks a slight shift in perspective and its meaning is twofold. For one, I get frustrated sometimes by what the world seems to require for success at a given task (for example, polished songwriting, coherent and understandable communication), so part of this is just me venting on this subject. Sometimes I would rather flow with free writing than try to box songs into rehearsed, many-times-repeated containers.
Second, at times I find myself wishing people would not hold so many preconceptions about the things in this world a given person might try to communicate. Most of us, myself included, usually assume we already know a lot – even about things we’ve spent very little time thinking about – and because of this attitude, people are often predisposed to misunderstand new ideas, even when they’re communicated in straightforward and coherent ways. But there’s no doubt, an idea won’t ever get through until there’s someone around to listen to it.”
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 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.
Never has Nap Eyes sounded more ferocious. It took them a long time and a long practice to reach this artistic zen, but one gets the feeling throughout Snapshot of a Beginner that this balance is going to hold.
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