An Eraser And A Maze

An Eraser and a Maze is the eighth studio album by Modest Mouse, released on June 5, 2026 through frontman Isaac Brock's own Glacial Pace Recordings, distributed by Virgin Music Group. It marks a significant milestone as the band's first fully independent release since their 1997 landmark The Lonesome Crowded West, coming after over two decades on Epic Records. The album was produced by Brock alongside collaborators Jacknife Lee, Suzy Shinn, and Justin Raisen, and spans fifteen tracks of restless, eclectic indie rock. It is also the first Modest Mouse album since the death of co-founding drummer Jeremiah Green, who passed away from cancer in late 2022, and features three different drummers across its runtime, including Janet Weiss of Sleater-Kinney.

Thematically, the album is shaped by grief, memory, and mortality, though it approaches those subjects from an unexpected angle. As InBetweenDrafts notes, Brock's organizing sentiment is a quiet inversion of the usual plea of the dead — not "remember me," but "remember yourself." The album is also conceptually anchored in a physics theory positing the simultaneous existence of past, present, and future, which informs its tendency to reach across eras of the band's sound at once. Rolling Stone Australia describes it as finding Brock "taking stock in the meaning of life and the weight of existence over songs that ramble and tumble, at times tilting towards glory, in other moments coming relatably unglued."