Modest Mouse are doing it on their own. After more than two decades on Epic Records, the band has announced An Eraser and a Maze, their eighth studio album and first independent release since 1997's The Lonesome Crowded West. It arrives June 5 via Glacial Pace Recordings, Isaac Brock's own label.
That detail — the return to independence — matters. Brock founded Glacial Pace in the mid-2000s, but Modest Mouse's major label deal kept the band's own releases on Epic. An Eraser and a Maze represents a genuine reorientation, a decision to operate outside the machinery that has, over the past decade, increasingly made Modest Mouse feel like a legacy act waiting for the right moment to reassert itself.
The album started life as an EP for Brock's Ugly Casanova side project before expanding into a full Modest Mouse record. 'For this one, I turned off my filter and just let it all happen,' Brock said in a statement, before immediately self-deprecating: 'Even though every goddamn musician says that when they put out a record. I mean, go ahead and listen to the three-minute mark of any interview between a musician and Terry Gross...' That's the Isaac Brock we know and love.
The 15-track album includes lead singles 'Look How Far' (which premiered in March) and 'Picking Dragon's Pockets,' plus songs called 'Third Side Of The Moon,' 'Stoner Party,' and 'Impossible Somedays.' A song called 'Dogbed in Heaven/Give It A Skeleton' is either deeply weird or deeply beautiful, and given Brock's track record, probably both.
The tour that follows the album is genuinely enormous — festivals at Kilby Block Party, Outside Lands, Bonnaroo, and Shaky Knees, plus headlining dates that include Chicago's The Salt Shed, Ryman Auditorium in Nashville, and a rooftop at Pier 17 in New York. This is Modest Mouse at full operating capacity. June 5.