Album Reviews
Thirty Years Down the Wrong Road: Modest Mouse Keep Moving Through the Maze
Annette Geneva
19 July 2026
Modest Mouse - An Eraser and a Maze (2026)
(Glacial Pace Recordings)
It’s no secret, Modest Mouse are one of my favourite bands. They age like roadside maps - ink runs, the roads bend, whole towns disappear, but somehow the route still makes sense when you hold it up to the light. That’s Modest Mouse to me.
On An Eraser and a Maze, Isaac Brock sounds less interested in rewriting the story of Modest Mouse and more into continuing that legacy one step at a time. That matters. This is the band’s first album in five years, their first independent release in nearly three decades, and the first full-length made after the death of founding drummer Jeremiah Green in 2022. The ghosts are in the room, but they’re not treated like museum exhibits. They rattle the walls and the songs keep moving.
I’ve loved Modest Mouse for the same reason I love cracked neon signs and late-night petrol stations: nothing in their world ever feels polished enough to be fake. Brock has always written like someone arguing with the universe while simultaneously asking it for directions. You know that Simpsons meme “Old man yelling at cloud” and that’s the vibe Isaac holds in my head.
On this record, that argument has gone grey around the temples, but it hasn’t lost its bite. The opening stretch immediately reminds you why this band still matters. “Picking Dragons’ Pockets” sounds like Brock rummaging through the wreckage of middle age and finding a few sparks still burning underneath. It is one of the album’s defining tracks: funny, bitter, self-aware and strangely triumphant all at once. “Remember Yourself” is as tender as “Little Motel” off We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank. “Life’s a Dream” is obvious wonderful and catchy, but it’s “Third Side Of The Moon” that got me in love with this record. The harmonies alone are reminiscent of Good News for People Who Love Bad News. If any song here feels destined to become a cult favourite, it’s this one. The melody drifts in with a bruised kind of grace before Brock pulls it into stranger territory, the way he always has. It carries the album’s central tension: mortality staring down absurdity. Hard not to mention first single “Look How Far” that hits with that familiar sideways momentum, somewhat political urgency and existential static.
What I love most is that An Eraser and a Maze refuses to drag you back into fandom via pure nostalgia. This isn’t The Lonesome Crowded West part two, and thank God for that. The record was reportedly born from material Brock originally considered for Ugly Casanova(makes so much sense) before expanding it into a full Modest Mouse album. You can hear that looseness everywhere. The songs wander. They double back. They occasionally trip over themselves. It’s not a clean cut album. It’s fuzzy, noisy and I bet it spits in choruses. I love that. It’s so much in my orbit, i can’t fault a single layer. Brock himself said he “turned off my filter” while making it, and the album benefits from that lack of restraint. Not every track lands cleanly, it’s Modest Mouse after all. A couple drift by in a haze where the hooks blur into the scenery, and the album could probably lose a few minutes without losing its soul. But I’d rather hear a messy Modest Mouse record chasing strange ideas than a tidy one pretending the weirdness is over. The imperfections are part of the contract.
Hearing Brock confront legacy without surrendering to it hits the hardest. Thirty years into this band’s existence, after the major-label years, after “Float On” became both blessing and burden, after losing Jeremiah Green, he sounds exhausted, grateful, suspicious, and stubbornly alive. Those contradictions have always been the engine of Modest Mouse. By the time the album closes, I’m left with the same feeling I had the first time I heard The Moon & Antarctica: the sensation that someone has translated anxiety, wonder and dark humour into a geography you can walk through. It doesn’t give answers. It gives landmarks. Like a map would, of course.
And honestly? I love this record. It doesn’t recapture the past it is a not so surprising addition to the ever expanding world of Modest Mouse. This album is standing in the wreckage, lighting a cigarette, and deciding the road is still worth taking.
And my own two cents here to all the people who didn’t enjoy Golden Casket. Go back to it after listening to this one, sit in the feeling and tell me that something in you shifted. If it didn’t, well…worth a try.
P.S.:
I love it on vinyl because of its beautifully designed sleeves and art, that Modest Mouse never disappoint with.