“Every day we’re confronted with a confusing and scary world… Making music and creating things can feel flippant or unnecessary, but my own world view was defined and influenced by art and artists who weren’t afraid to highlight and offer solutions: Public Enemy, The Smiths or a wider American counterculture,” said Jack Cooper, founder and mainman of Modern Nature (whose musical narratives revolve around “themes of collectivism, our relationship with the natural world, [and] the weight of consciousness”), prior to the release of their latest LP, The Heat Warps, which dropped last August via Bella Union… Fittingly, perhaps more so than we would have hoped for, the English band (currently a four-piece) are preparing to embark on their second run of US dates behind the album, which kicks off tonight in Boston and includes a January 23rd stop at our very own MilkBoy.
Jack Cooper – previously of indie rock outfits The Beep Seals, Mazes, and Ultimate Painting, in addition to being an acclaimed avant-garde composer – birthed Modern Nature in early 2019, but The Heat Warps sees the band taking a new form. Joining Cooper and core members Jim Wallis (drums) and Jeff Tobias (bass) is guitarist Tara Cunningham, providing the band with a dual guitar sound Cooper has noted as feeling akin to the demos Television did with Brian Eno (BrooklynVegan notes the sound as, “somewhere between The Velvet Underground, The Grateful Dead, and Television at their most tranquil.”) While previous releases had seen Modern Nature drifting into the free-form, abstract, and experimental, with musicians sometimes numbering in the double-digits, their latest full-length has them embracing the quartet, and making sure to capture the energy of the four of them playing in a room together as a rock band… at least in the broadest sense of the term.
However, The Heat Warps does include a couple select guests, with the majority of tracks featuring additional vocals by Tsouni Cooper, Jack’s wife, and two songs featuring the voice of Brigid Dawson, best known as longtime on-again-off-again singer, keyboardist, and tambourine player of Osees (who will be playing their 10/25 show at Union Transfer). In addition to her October appearance with the garage rock legends in Eraserhood, Dawson’s very own Brigid Dawson & The Mothers Network will be providing support for Modern Nature’s North American jaunt… and hopefully she’ll join the headliners at least for the album tracks on which she appears, as well…
Brigid Dawson can also be seen in “Take Our Chances,” a short film by Michael Stasiak documenting the making of The Heat Warps throughout England in November of 2024. Watch the film above and have a listen to “Shasta,” Modern Nature’s latest single, which dropped in December. Jack Cooper has explained that the song, inspired by the California landscape, was recorded during the album sessions, but narrowly missed the final track listing, before he decided that it’s something fans needed to hear from this latest iteration of Modern Nature.
“I wrote the words to this song when I was looking out the window driving through Northern California in 2024. For about an hour of the drive Mount Shasta loomed in the distance. Obscured by silhouettes of pine, mist and steamy van windows. It looked like Mount Doom. A lot of The Heat Warps words were written whilst looking out of a van window. ‘Shasta’ didn’t quite make the record. At the time I felt it didn’t quite fit and changed the flow of the album. Important things! In the intervening months, I’ve revisited it and seen something in it that I didn’t at the time.”
*Get your tickets here.
