“I will have spent my life trying to understand the function of remembering, which is not the
opposite of forgetting, but rather its lining. We do not remember. We rewrite memory much as
history is rewritten. How can one remember thirst?”
– Chris Marker, Sans Soleil (1983)

When we last heard from Nap Eyes, in May 2021, in the wake of their fourth full-length
record, Snapshot of a Beginner (PoB-058), released in March 2020 at the uncertain brink of the
COVID-19 pandemic—their truncated tour with Destroyer was the final concert some of us
saw for a year or longer—they were sharing covers by Green Day and Bonnie Raitt, on an EP
plainly titled When I Come Around. It was an earthbound exercise, perhaps, in vigorous
nostalgia as antidote to the exhaustion of awaiting an unusually unknowable future.
Then, silence—circumstantial but also self-imposed, unvowed but total.

Now, exactly three years later to the day, they’re back with two songs, old and new, that
bookend the band’s history, monuments, or mnemonic mile markers, to fifteen years of
singular songmaking. It is no coincidence that both songs are themselves concerned with
marking, attenuating, and collapsing time.

There are classic Nap Eyes touchstones here—the uneasy interplay of physics and
philosophy, perambulatory descriptions of landscape and weather, self-interrogating
soliloquies, technological anxiety, apertures of surreality, video games—but also the sense,
intentionally and unabashedly exhibited in the contrast, both sonic and lyrical, between the
two specimens, that Nap Eyes have transmuted, as has their understanding of what a song is,
what it can do, where it might go.