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Apr 28, 2022 By Caleb Campbell

Tomorrow, Vancouver indie rock outfit Frog Eyes are set to return with their new full-length album, The Bees. Arriving four years after the band temporarily disbanded in 2018, and twenty years after their debut LP, The Bloody Hand, the record sees the band exploring their storied past and shifting present in new radical ways, incorporating both into an expansive new creative vision.

As Carey Mercer explains, “At some point, I started thinking a lot (too much?) about a very specific kind of pressure put on record producers, music makers, to constantly innovate or reinvent ourselves…novelists and painters are allowed to have eras, periods, bodies of work that find a small bit of psychic space and then, over years and decades, testify to the ecology of that space. So I wrote songs that take in the view of my past, or explore the little stake I have made over the past twenty years of work: I thought of my past as my future, and it felt a bit radical.”

The full record is out tomorrow, but today you can get an early listen to the record’s title track, “The Bees,” premiering early with Under the Radar.

“The Bees” is a true highlight from the record, characterized by Mercer’s distinctive vocal performance, rippling indie rock soundscapes, cryptic poeticism, and sprawling songwriting. The track drifts through a winding stream-of-consciousness style, conjuring a vital, free-flowing energy tinged with tense mysticism. The song’s standout moment comes with its instrumental second half, where the listener finds themselves immersed in the track’s expansive and ever-shifting soundscape, swept away in a rush of hypnotic melody.

Mercer describes the track’s inspiration saying, “Once I slept outside in a place where a river flows into the open ocean. The low-lying topography makes this place vulnerable to tsunami waves, should an earthquake occur. At the top of the hill behind the river, there is an old dam with no seismic upgrades. This spot is about 40 kilometers from the Cascadia subduction zone. If an earthquake occurred, you might have a tsunami barreling in. You might also have a torrent of water and trees and concrete barreling down on you from the ruptured dam.

I felt exhaustion lying there at the edge of the river. I had no automobile to get out. The song “The Bees” is like stretching a piece of musical latex around the fear I was feeling. I was so tired from trying to get to this spot without an automobile. The safety plan was, if the dam burst, to just drive away. But what if you don’t have an automobile to drive? As I sing in this song: “Where is my guide?” As I dealt with my panic by panicking, or panic-attacking, I thought to myself, “Why do I resist?” That is the last line of the song.”

Check out “The Bees” below. The full record is out April 29th via Paper Bag Records.