Credit: Ben MoonModest Mouse's new album, Strangers to Ourselves, has finally arrived. The record, Modest Mouse's first album in eight years, was released earlier this week. Many factors contributed to the long gap in between albums, including the fact that frontman Isaac Brock wasn't sure how he wanted Strangers to Ourselves to sound.
"I was going to make a record that was really boring, like a rock and roll version of [the 1938 play] Our Town where the songs went nowhere and they just plodded along with mundane daily stories," Brock tells Billboard. "I got like five songs into that and then said, 'Alright, that's enough.' Then I just wanted to play a hard f**king rock record, no overdubs."
At the beginning of recording Strangers to Ourselves, Brock also set out to produce the album himself, but that didn't work out too well.
"I fired myself," Brock says. "Then we kept having people come in to work on the record, but everyone had other s**t scheduled after x-amount of days, so no one wanted to hang out while we took three years rerecording bass parts and putting mics in jugs of water to see how it sounds. It doesn't sound great. There's a reason they're not selling the jug-of-water mic."
Now that Strangers to Ourselves is finally out, Brock is already looking towards the next Modest Mouse record.
"I was semi-intentionally making two records at once," he says. "I put more songs on this record than I thought I was going to and I cut a few more songs than I thought...so I still got some work to do to make the next record."
In other Modest Mouse news, the band made their return to late-night TV for the first time in six years Tuesday night when they guested on The Tonight Show. They performed their hit "Lampshades on Fire," the lead single from Strangers to Ourselves.
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