Frog Eyes - The Open Up (2025)

Cult-rock band Frog Eyes announce their second album since reforming in 2021, and their tenth record in a consistently bewildering and inspired catalogue. Formed at the turn of the century, brushing shoulders with fellow travellers/beloved songwriters and musicians, beloved but never in the dead epicentre of a scene or a marketable, commodified era, this record bursts with a joyful fealty to songs, to albums, to playing the song you want to hear with the people you want to play with in a space that lifts it all up.

The Open Up, was tracked to tape by ace-engineer John Raham (Frazey Ford, Destroyer), recorded off-the-floor, with subsequent vocal overdubs and electric guitar and grand piano flourishes. Huffy-puffy rock and roll, open-ended mid-tempo dreaminess, sad and soft love songs: it’s an emotional and spatial journey, and meant to be experienced as an album. Electric guitar, piano-like synthesizer, frantic and frenetic drums and melodic bass fill up the corners and create a foundational support for the words, spit-sung into a special German tube microphone and shuttled out to a Studer tape machine to create the syllabic echoes, and the sounds as they converge in the centre of your speakers make us think of 1995 emo, at times, in its chord structures, a remnant/echo of a youth playing in that specific genre, post-punk in its wired up tautness and Fall-like square edges, weird blues, baby-bad-boy goth rock, and then, in its final third, a spacious rise-up that revels in more “open” modalities.

Underneath, (as in an underground river), the entire project, starting in 2001 and coming up on a 25th silver jubilee, is a flowing devotion to the idea of the album, the idea that a collection of songs could work together to create a body of meaning beyond each individual tune; absent are any overarching themes or conceits, present is a flood of pondering, of noticing, of trying to work it out, the sound of two years of blinking. Personnel are: Ryan Beattie, bass (and singing); Shyla Seller, Keys; Melanie Campbell, Drums; Carey Mercer, Guitar (and singing).