Despite a brief dissolution at the tail end of the 2010s, Frog Eyes have been a consistent source of eclectic, literary art-rock alongside fellow Canadian outfits like Wolf Parade, New Pornographers, and Destroyer. Today they’re announcing their tenth album, titled The Open Up, which sees the group favoring analog practices over electronics—though not in an “unplugged” sort of way. “I wrote the songs without the use of any technology beyond paper (some old D&D map book that was laying around here that has useful squares for letters and words),” explains band leader Carey Mercer before going on a brief anti-screen screed. “I wrote the songs without using any computer or phone. If the riff or verse was good enough, I reckoned, I would remember it.”
The focus for The Open Up, then, is on performance rather than any production embellishments which may have only distracted from Mercer’s songwriting in the past. It feels like this process of reconfiguring their sound inspired the project’s first single, which does more than just introduce the record’s pared-back yet still-driving sound. “‘I See the Same Things’ is a song about being stuck,” Mercer explains, “feeling the rut, feeling glued into the rituals of days, but also a song about feeling the ground move underneath your feet, feeling the tremors of enormous change, that push-pull tension, and the resolution of realizing that it’s the positive ritual or the daily practice of whatever you are committed to that pulls you forward, that gets you moving again.”
Arriving with the new tune is a music video directed by longtime collaborator Derek Janzen that further establishes the band’s rejection of modern technology. “The concept for the video is to show Shyla, our keyboard player, digitizing and archiving performance-art pieces that took place in an artist-run center here in Vancouver called The Western Front,” notes Mercer. “It’s a conversation, as all art is, with the art of the city that you live in. We are all just doing the same things, day in, day out. It’s how art gets made, I think.”
Check it out below, and expect The Open Up to drop March 7 via Paper Bag Records.