More than four years on from their last LP, 2020's Snapshot of a Beginner, Halifax jangle authorities Nap Eyes have announced their return for their fifth studio album. Today, they're previewing the collection with new single "Passageway."
The Neon Gate is due October 18 through Paper Bag Records / Paradise of Bachelors, marking the band's first release for the former. It was recorded between Montreal and Windsor, NS, with mixing by René Wilson and Brad Loughead, and includes recent singles "Demons," "Ice Grass Underpass" and "Feline Wave Race" — featured in Exclaim!'s Staff Picks.
Between adaptations of poems by W. B. Yeats and Alexander Pushkin, philosophical treatises and endeavours into nonlinear abstraction, press notes suggest that Nap Eyes' heady songcraft has "transmuted, as has their understanding of what a song is, what it can do, where it might go."
"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," songwriter Nigel Chapman explained of latest single "Passageway" — the last verse of which notably beginning with "Is this what I get for listening to 'Iris' / At nine o'clock on a Monday morning?"
He continued, "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."
Give the twang-tinged "Passageway" a listen below, where you can also check out the full album tracklist.
The Neon Gate:
1. Eight Tired Starlings
2. Dark Mystery Enigma Bird
3. Demons
4. Feline Wave Race
5. Tangent Dissolve
6. Ice Grass Underpass
7. Passageway
8. I See Phantoms of Hatred and the Heart's Fullness and of the Coming Emptiness
9. Isolation