‘An Eraser And A Maze’ review: Modest Mouse moves on

Modest Mouse’s latest album, An Eraser And A Maze, answers grief’s oldest plea—remember me—with a stranger, braver one: remember yourself.

Every elegy makes the same request. Keep me alive in the telling; let the song outlast the body. Isaac Brock spends his band’s eighth album, and its first since the 2022 death of co-founding drummer Jeremiah Green, dismantling that request from the inside. “Remember this when I’m gone,” he sings two tracks deep, and the line tilts exactly where a lesser writer would let it rest.

Actually, it’s a correction: “Remember yourself, not me.” Brock told the press the whole record lives inside that phrase — “People pass through, people pass on. Remember yourself.” On a grief album swimming in an ocean of 2026 grief albums, it reads as perhaps the most generous gesture in his catalog. A man writing an elegy for his oldest friend hands the listener permission to forget him.

That inversion organizes everything around it, and it would be too easy to sort the album into the usual launch-week chatter of “return to form” or “overstuffed.” But An Eraser And A Maze earns its title as a single image of grief’s machinery. An eraser removes; a maze traps. Put them together and you get the exact motion of mourning. A hand trying to rub out a path through a structure built to keep you walking.

A memory degrading in real time.

“Third Side of the Moon,” the album’s devastated center, watches a memory degrade in real time. Brock tries to recall a dead friend’s eye color, lands on “blue or green or brown,” loses it across verses, and finally garbles the words themselves into “bleen or glue or red.” A casual listen hears a Brock goof. A closer one hears language dissolving on contact with loss, the color words decaying because the face behind them already has.

He reaches for the heart as a finite meter — “you only get so many thumps in your whole life” — and the title’s nod to Pink Floyd’s own album for a lost member completes the thought. A third side of the moon would be the dead man’s vantage. The one view forever sealed off.

The dog runs through the record as Brock’s truest emblem for all this. “Dogbed in Heaven” pictures an afterlife scaled down to an animal’s wants, then pivots into the album’s sharpest thesis on (again) memory. “A cause needs a skeleton to walk around / We only gave ours a name.” Naming the dead keeps them as abstraction. Brock wants the skeleton, the thing that walks, and he knows a name supplies far less. That couplet rhymes straight back to “remember yourself, not me.” Both lines confess the same limit. That memory holds a silhouette where a person used to stand. And both choose honesty over the comfort the form usually sells.

The album’s sonic logic.

The physics conceit Brock floated in the press notes, that past, present, and future coexist and time itself plays a trick, gives the album its sonic logic. And, paradoxically, it’s alibi for mess. Every Modest Mouse era talks at once here. You have the jagged carnival of “Picking Dragons’ Pockets,” where Brock calls the culture cannibal — “We’ve been eatin’ our own young” — and clocks the feeds with “Facts aren’t facts on screens that glow.”

There’s also the ramshackle sprint of “Speak ‘N Spell (Or Not),” where he grins through “Life is fucking awesome and I know that it is / I know this because I’m living it.” The sprawl that critics will likely tally as a tracklist begging for triage sounds instead like eternalism made audible. If all moments stand side by side, then Green stands somewhere too. And the album’s restlessness becomes a way of keeping every coordinate occupied.

Brock makes that idea literal on “Absolutely Necessary Never,” where Green earns a posthumous drum-programming credit. The dead man playing on the album about his death, the ghost inside the machine he helped build. Janet Weiss of Sleater-Kinney fills the kit on lead single “Look How Far…,” whose hook turns its own joke into a survival creed. “Look how far we haven’t come!”

Dead-ending inside the maze.

Jacknife Lee, Suzy Shinn, and Brock himself produce, and the freedom of Glacial Pace — Brock’s own label, his first fully independent home since Epic signed the band at the century’s turn — hands him every take he wants to keep. He keeps them all. The 35-second “Stoner Party,” the one-line drone of “Song About Nothing,” the interludes that flare and vanish. These are the eraser at work, scrubbing songs mid-thought, dead-ending inside the maze.

“Impossible Somedays” closes on the move Brock has spent thirty years perfecting, widening the lens until grief turns geological. “The rocks become liquid, the liquid turns into a gas.” In that lyric, a single human loss dissolves into deep time. It consoles the way Modest Mouse always consoles, by making you very small. The flaws stay flaws. An editor would have banked a few of these fragments for the vault. Yet An Eraser And A Maze lands as the most alive Brock has sounded in a decade precisely because he lets every version of himself crowd the room and tells you, on the way out, to remember your own.

An Eraser And A Maze is available now.

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Images courtesy of Glacial Pace Recordings.