Name: Nap Eyes + Eliza Niemi (Followed by Kitchen Club Indie Disco)
Start: 2025-05-10T18:30:00+01:00
Location: The Tin Music and Arts

Nap Eyes + Eliza Niemi (Followed by Kitchen Club Indie Disco)

𝗡𝗔𝗣 𝗘𝗬𝗘𝗦 + 𝗘𝗟𝗜𝗭𝗔 𝗡𝗜𝗘𝗠𝗜 𝗳𝗼𝗹𝗹𝗼𝘄𝗲𝗱 𝗯𝘆 𝗞𝗶𝘁𝗰𝗵𝗲𝗻 𝗖𝗹𝘂𝗯 𝗜𝗻𝗱𝗶𝗲 𝗗𝗶𝘀𝗰𝗼 (𝗗𝗼𝗼𝗿𝘀 𝟭𝟬.𝟬𝟬𝗽𝗺)
𝘍𝘰𝘳 𝘧𝘳𝘦𝘦 𝘦𝘯𝘵𝘳𝘺 𝘵𝘰 𝘤𝘭𝘶𝘣 𝘯𝘪𝘨𝘩𝘵 𝘱𝘭𝘦𝘢𝘴𝘦 𝘴𝘦𝘭𝘦𝘤𝘵 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘤𝘰𝘳𝘳𝘦𝘤𝘵 𝘵𝘪𝘤𝘬𝘦𝘵.
𝗡𝗔𝗣 𝗘𝗬𝗘𝗦
After three years of silence, the Canadian band Nap Eyes have returned with their own meditations on the monstrous and familiar (or the monstrously familiar). The Neon Gate, their metamorphic fifth long-player, collects a cache of nine fascinating reveries recorded over the four years since their last album, Snapshot of a Beginner(five of which were released episodically throughout the spring and summer of 2024). “I See Phantoms of Hatred and of the Heart's Fullness and of the Coming Emptiness,” the album’s colossal penultimate track, is, along with “Demons,” their languorous adaptation of a phantasmagorical poem by Russian Romantic Alexander Pushkin (1799–1837), one of two ambitious but adept adaptations in which singer and principal songwriter Nigel Chapman unravels knotty, century-old verse into a fluid, memorable melodies across the loom of the band’s pulsing instrumental syncretism.
This fresh engagement with narrative and lyric formality complements the seven original songs on the record, which reveal classic Naps touchstones (the uneasy interplay of physics and philosophy, the nexus of fantasy and science fiction, perambulatory descriptions of landscape and weather, self-interrogating soliloquies, apertures of surreality, technological anxiety, video games), but also evidence of divergent impulses toward nonlinear abstraction and longform improvisational composition (resulting in their most discursive, deconstructed, and deliquescent songs to date). With The Neon Gate Nap Eyes have transmuted, as has their understanding of what a song is, what it can do, where it might go.
𝗘𝗟𝗜𝗭𝗔 𝗡𝗜𝗘𝗠𝗜
On Progress Bakery, her second album as a solo artist, Eliza knows to leave some questions alone – to let juxtaposition and tension be the proof. It doesn’t have to be hard. The feelings and revelations they provoke rise in the heat. The smell is sweet. Crispy on the outside and soft all the way through. She playfully slip-slides through words and sounds and images, delighting in surprise, skimming ideas like stones cast across clear water, touching down briefly with uncommon grace.