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Jun 22, 2020 By Christopher Roberts Photography by Danny Cohen Conor Oberst

Bright Eyes (Conor Oberst, Mike Mogis, and Nathaniel Walcott) have officially announced their new album, Down in the Weeds Where the World Once Was, and shared a new song from it, “Mariana Trench,” via a video for the track. Down in the Weeds Where the World Once Was is the band’s first new album in nine years and includes three previously shared singles. It’s due out August 21 via Dead Oceans. Tonight the band will be performing “Mariana Trench” on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, which will be their first public performance together since a November 2011 show in Honolulu. Art Camp directed the animated “Mariana Trench” video. Watch it below, followed by the album’s tracklist and cover art.

Down in the Weeds Where the World Once Was is the band’s first album for Dead Oceans and the first Bright Eyes album since 2011’s The People’s Key. The album includes three previously shared singles: “Persona Non Grata,” a new song the band shared in March that was their first new song in nine years; “Forced Convalescence,” a new song shared in April that was one of our Songs of the Week; and “One and Done,” a new song shared in May via a lyric video that was also one of our Songs of the Week.

The band announced in January that they had signed to Dead Oceans and had been recording, with intentions to release new music this year. They also previously announced a world tour (although those tour dates have been postponed to 2021 due to COVID-19). In January they also shared a teaser video featuring them recording in the studio with an orchestra.

Oberst has kept busy in the last decade with solo and collaborative projects (such as last year’s Better Oblivion Community Center duo with Phoebe Bridgers). Since Bright Eyes went on hiatus, Mogis has kept busy as a producer and Walcott has worked as a film composer. Oberst’s punk band Desaparecidos also reformed for 2015’s Payola. But all three members have remained in close contact with each other, with Oberst living 15 minutes away from Walcott while at his home in Los Angeles and living next door to Mogis while at his home in Omaha. It was at a Christmas party at Walcott’s house in LA in 2017 that Oberst first suggested to Walcott that they get the band back together. The two then called Mogis, who was Christmas shopping in Omaha at the time, and he immediately agreed.

“Our history and our friendship, and my trust level with them, is so complete and deep. And I wanted it to feel as much like a three-headed monster as possible,” says Oberst of the reunion, commenting in a press release.

The album was recorded at Omaha’s ARC Studios, Los Angeles’s Electro-Vox, and LA’s Capitol Studios. The album also features Jon Theodore (The Mars Volta, Queens of the Stone Age) on drums and the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ Flea on bass.

The press release further sets the scene for the album: “As a title, as a thesis, Down in the Weeds Where the World Once Was functions on a global, apocalyptic level of anxiety that looms throughout the record. But on a personal level, it speaks to rooting around in the dirt of one’s memories, trying to find the preciousness that’s overgrown and unrecognizable. For Conor Oberst, coming back to Bright Eyes was a bit of that. A symbol of simpler times, vaguely nostalgic. And even though it wasn’t actually possible to go back to the way things were, even though there wasn’t an easy happy ending, there was a new reality left to work with.”

Art Camp had this to say in the press release about the “Marina Trench” video: “The production of the video started at the beginning of quarantine and finished as people came back out of their homes and took to the streets together. In 18 different bedrooms across the world, listening to Bright Eyes, keeping each other company, we got the chance to collaborate on a story about embracing and celebrating change. The animation is composed of 2,200 hand-illustrated ink paintings based on original 3D animation and archival footage. We hope it makes you excited to imagine that everything could be new.”

Down in the Weeds Where the World Once Was Tracklist:

01 Pageturner’s Rag
02 Dance and Sing
03 Just Once in the World
04 Mariana Trench
05 One and Done
06 Pan and Broom
07 Stairwell Song
08 Persona Non Grata
09 Tilt-A-Whirl
10 Hot Car in the Sun
11 Forced Convalescence
12 To Death’s Heart (In Three Parts)
13 Calais to Dover
14 Comet Song

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