An Eraser And A Maze

Modest Mouse — 2026

“An Eraser And A Maze finds Isaac Brock letting every version of himself into the room at once, for better and occasionally for worse.”

Isaac Brock has spent more than thirty years sounding like a man arguing with himself, and An Eraser And A Maze lets every version of him into the room at once. You can hear the jittery guitar scrape of the early records, the big swinging choruses of the Good News era, and the woozy drift of The Moon & Antarctica all bumping into each other, sometimes inside one song. For many songs here that works because Brock stopped trying to organize it. He says he just turned his filter off, and you believe him when a track about screen-poisoned paranoia (“Facts aren’t facts on screens that glow”) shares a record with a lullaby and a thirty-second goof about getting stoned. A somber undertone of this album is that Brock buried founding drummer Jeremiah Green and his friend Sam Jayne (Love As Laughter) while making the record, and their ghosts are literally on the tape, sampled and chanted into the songs. Strangely, An Eraser And A Maze carries death with a odd ease, more shrug than scream. “Remember yourself not me,” he sings, like a guy making peace with being forgotten. The catch though is length. There are almost too many ideas packed into fifteen tracks, and the long runtime holds the record back, the back half sagging some when I think a tighter edit would have made a better album. A couple of those loose ends (“Knocked Down By Waves,” “Stoner Party”) play like sketches Brock liked too much to cut but they also don’t add to the album. Luckily for fans those dead ends and half thoughts don’t ruin the total experience. The singles here are strong and do remind me more of the classic indie Mouse that made us all pay attention in the first place.

“Picking Dragon’s Pockets” is the opener and has you cheering that Modest Mouse are back! The song finds Brock spitting about a culture eating its young, landing on the album’s best one-liner: “love makes love and hate makes more.” “Third Side Of The Moon” is a deeper track that really could only come from a veteran like Brock as it is a quiet account of someone found frozen in their car, told by a narrator who keeps failing to recall the color of their eyes because “you always spoke in whisper and I ain’t so good at listening.” Clearly plays like a remembrance of both friends he lost. “Look How Far” has a Modest Mouse march with its big bright guitars carrying the funniest and most miserable hook on the record, that “look how far we haven’t come” howl at human stupidity.

If you have been around the beginning of Modest Mouse then you already know the lineage, but this one earns a Pixies comparison with its loud quiet whiplash and the Black Francis style yelp. The death that surrounds it reminds me of Mount Eerie, where Phil Elverum turned grief into plainspoken songs that refuse to dress it up. The restless, talky character writing also has a lot in common with Silver Jews, David Berman’s gift for a line that lands funny and bleak in the same breath living all over Brock’s notebook here.

Brock keeps insisting he barely knows what he feels, then sings something that gives the whole game away. Even though the record is a tad too long, the mess is the message, and most of the time the mess is worth sitting in.