[Photo Credit to Soloman Chiniquay]
Vancouver-based band Frog Eyes has returned with The Bees after their foray into making music as Soft Plastics. Carey Mercer (vocals, guitar), Melanie Campbell (drums), and Shyla Seller (synthesizer, electric piano) have chosen 2022 to release their latest album, a year that marks the twentieth anniversary of their debut LP, The Bloody Hand, a record that had a big presence in the post 9/11 Pacific Northwest music scene.
Carey Mercer comments:
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.
When it came time to record, Frog Eyes chose musician John Raham to engineer the album at Afterlife Studios. Mercer adds, regarding returning to the name Frog Eyes at the end of the recording process:
And when we came to the end, it only made sense to return, in name, to what we have always been (the band called Frog Eyes), because can you ever really sound like anything but yourselves?
