Nap Eyes - The Neon Gate

After 3 years of silence, the Canadian band Nap Eyes have returned with their own meditations on the monstrous and familiar (or the monstrously familiar). The Neon Gate, their metamorphic 5th long-player, collects a cache of 9 fascinating reveries recorded over the 4 years since their last album, Snapshot of a Beginner (5 of which were released episodically throughout the spring and summer of 2024). “I See Phantoms of Hatred and of the Heart's Fullness and of the Coming Emptiness,” the album’s colossal penultimate track, is, along with “Demons,” their languorous adaptation of a phantasmagorical poem by Russian Romantic Alexander Pushkin (1799–1837), one of two ambitious but adept adaptations in which singer and principal songwriter Nigel Chapman unravels knotty, century-old verse into a fluid, memorable melodies across the loom of the band’s pulsing instrumental syncretism.

For fans of Yo La Tengo, The Only Ones, Swell Maps, The Modern Lovers, Felt, The Clean, The Verlaines, The Go-Betweens, Kurt Vile, Courtney Barnett, Belle and Sebastian, all things Lou Reed.

Genre: Alt Indie