Nap Eyes open The Neon Gate // first album in 4 years details

Nap Eyes

"The Neon Gate"

First album in four years is out October 18th via Paradise of Bachelors

Listen to "Passageway":
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VpebBiPKerI

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. 

That all sounds deadly serious, but these songs are also as funny, quirky, and touching as ever, juxtaposing absurdist Middle Ages settings with concisely rendered quotidian details of journeys between earthly and cosmic planes (see the picaresque first single “Passageway” in particular). Castles and mystical critters abound, and faith in chemistry, astrophysics, and naturalistic observation tempers the spiraling doubt that can accompany deep cogitation.

 These are demonic images, for sure, and this is familiarly eldritch territory for Nap Eyes, who in 2021 released “Blood River,” a song inspired by their online Dungeons and Dragonscampaign. But beyond the Neon Gate, Yeats’s “wisdom of daemonic images”—in the ancient Greek sense of an animating human spirit, lacking any suggestion of evil—pertains more in these songs, inscrutably beautiful riddles which, a full decade into Nap Eyes’ career, “suffice the ageing man as once the growing boy.”

Nigel Chapman on first single "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."

Listen to all four new Nap Eyes songs, watch the accompanying visuals, and pre-order The Neon Gate here.

Nigel Chapman - vocals, guitars, synths, drum programming
Brad Loughead - guitars, bass, synths, drum programming
Josh Salter - bass, guitars, synths
Seamus Dalton - drums, guitars, synth