Earlier this year, Isaac Brock brought about 2,400 of his disciples aboard the inaugural Ice Cream Floats, a festival cruise during which his band Modest Mouse performed three sets across a four-day journey between Miami and the Dominican Republic. Brock, initially reluctant, wanted to route the ship from Seattle to Alaska, figuring it’d be a logical backdrop for the Pacific Northwest band’s songs about isolation—he only acquiesced to tropical waters so that their “dumb rock music” wouldn’t disrupt northern nature preserves. Three decades since Modest Mouse’s debut album and two since “Float On” propelled them to MTV stardom, a cruise might seem like a late-career Hail Mary, or at the very least an odd match for Brock. As he tells it on An Eraser and a Maze, he, too, is trying to make sense of the state of Modest Mouse today through the lens of his own conflicting identities: a beloved outcast, a contentious hero, and an understated rebel who’s managing to mostly keep it together.
An Eraser and a Maze is Modest Mouse’s first album since the passing of founding drummer Jeremiah Green, who died shortly after they released 2021’s The Golden Casket, leaving Brock as the band’s only remaining original member. Where The Golden Casket felt uncharacteristically polished, Brock says he went more instinctual when writing An Eraser and a Maze: “I just turned my filter off more and just let it all happen,” he explained in a press release. With touring member Damon Cox filling in on drums on most tracks, the album also marks a bit of a recalibration for Modest Mouse, indie legends who are actually signed to an indie again—Brock’s own Glacial Pace—after five albums with major-label support.
As is his wont, Brock ponders mortality on songs like the soporific acoustic ballad “Remember Yourself,” spouting a lot of advice you’ve heard before. On the humming, hi-fi folk tune “Dogbed in Heaven/Give It a Skeleton,” he mulls over his bucket list and how much he’ll be missed in the afterlife, but the main takeaway is that Brock’s nervy wail is still just as robust as it was on Good News for People Who Love Bad News. Charli XCX/Sky Ferreira producer Justin Raisen brings some haunted synth-pop via “Rotten Fruit,” also chiming in: “Inside of every grave I know I’ve found a favorite friend.” The vocal feature, and the bass-overblown track itself, feel out of place: a forced crack at something different that comes off as filler.
More often than not, An Eraser and a Maze makes you wish Modest Mouse had been more deliberate in sharpening these no-filter moments, especially as the nondescript instrumentals regularly blur into the background—a few exceptions are Janet Weiss’ kinetic drums on “Look How Far…” and Russell Higbee’s melodic bass that takes the forefront on the serene closer, “Impossible Somedays.” Brock almost gets there on the reverb-soaked “Third Side Of The Moon,” singing in what sounds like genuinely drunk bereavement: “My heart pumped faster than could possibly be right/I read in a magazine the day before you only get so many thumps in your whole life.” The main difference between Brock’s current musings on his own existence and the ones he divulged in his early career is that now, he understands that he’ll have one hell of a legacy to leave behind—“Sooner than I hope, but I hope I’m wrong,” he clarifies.
On An Eraser and a Maze, Brock navigates the complex relationship to rock stardom with these stakes in mind. The first Modest Mouse radio hit of the decade could very well be the punchy, hook-riddled opener “Picking Dragons’ Pockets,” where Brock laments the commodification of his artistry and his own disillusionment: “Well they’ll go crazy if you don’t go crazy somehow/And I’m not crazy ‘bout what they’re so crazy ‘bout now,” he sings between mallet percussion riffs, wondering how many ill-fated anecdotes he has left into him to translate into song. “I can’t believe how long I’ve wanted to be living in the past,” he belts frenetically alongside the prodding guitar riffs of “Look How Far…,” offering brief but refreshing evidence that he can still tap into his unbridled energy. If Modest Mouse are trying to mine nostalgia, they’re smart to do so subtly, as on the ramshackle jam of mid-album highlight “Speak ‘N Spell (Or Not).” Guitar whammies and group chants embellish Brock’s reflections on his Sisyphean trajectory, though he does seem to root them in gratitude for the process: “Life is fucking awesome and I know that it is/I know this because I’m living it” feels like some sort of positive evolution. Brock has spent his whole career in turbulent waters. Maybe he’s learned a thing or two about navigating them.
