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In May, Halifax, Nova Scotia’s Nap Eyes shared two songs that bookended the band’s history; “Ice Grass Underpass”, written by the band’s principal songwriter and guitarist Nigel Chapman in 2009, predated the band’s existence entirely, while “Feline Wave Race” emerged from Chapman’s current improvisational writing practice. Today, they are announcing The Neon Gate (October 18th via Paradise of Bachelors and Paper Bag Records), their fifth album, which includes two ambitious adaptations of poems by Russian Romantic Alexander Pushkin (1799–1837) and William Butler Yeats (1865–1939).
Alongside these adaptations are seven, no less ambitious original songs (including “Ice Grass Underpass” and “Feline Wave Race”), described as classic Naps touchstones (the uneasy interplay of physics and philosophy, the nexus of fantasy and science fiction, perambulatory descriptions of landscape and weather, self-interrogating soliloquies, apertures of surreality, technological anxiety, 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).
While this may sound weighty, we are promised that they are also funny, quirky, and touching as ever, juxtaposing absurdist Middle Ages settings with concisely rendered quotidian details of journeys between earthly and cosmic planes.
The latter description especially applies to Passageway, their latest single, for which they’ve also shared a short visual. In accompanying press, Songwriter Nigel Chapman shared this 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.
Pre-Order The Neon Gate (October 18th via Paradise of Bachelors and Paper Bag Records): https://lnk.to/24naps
