The Neon Gate (CD)

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.

This fresh engagement with narrative and lyric formality complements the 7 original songs on the record, which reveal classic Naps touchstones but also evidence of divergent impulses toward nonlinear abstraction and longform improvisational composition (resulting in their most discursive, deconstructed, and deliquescent songs to date). With The Neon Gate Nap Eyes have transmuted, as has their understanding of what a song is, what it can do, where it might go.

Tracklist:

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...  
9. Isolation