Isaac Brock has always been more comfortable in the deep end of the cosmic kiddie pool than in the shallow end of “band puts out new album, tours, repeats.” Which might explain why Modest Mouse took six years to deliver The Golden Casket, an album that sounds like it was stitched together by someone whose head is permanently tuned to shortwave static, UFO chatter, and the dying hum of a bee colony.
“Honestly, I made years of loops. Just noise,” Brock shrugs, describing the time since 2015’s Strangers to Ourselves. “Years of just loops — insanity, I think. And then, you know, outside of music? Baby jail.” That’s Brock’s tender term for fatherhood. “What’s someone I know calls it and it’s pretty fitting. I’m certainly serving a couple sentences here.”
If he sounds unbothered, that’s the point. “I don’t think I’m being the best dad I can because I’m not upset by almost anything they do. They’re so fucking cute,” he says, like a man who’s given up the illusion of being in charge.
But cute kids only eat up so many hours. The rest of Brock’s mental bandwidth has been shotgunned across modular synths, conspiracies, UFOs, and the invisible math of the universe. “Most of the universe is invisible and it’s fucking wild,” he grins. “You know, like, we’re throwing around extremely low frequency waves and shit. It’s as real as you or me. We’re using it right now!” He pauses for effect, like a man who’s read every tinfoil thread on the dark web.
On The Golden Casket, he’s turned that static into a trippy audio scrapbook: alien frequencies, headphone trickery, thumb blisters from kalimba experiments that didn’t stick. “I started the whole thing off lying to myself and the producer saying I wasn’t gonna play guitar. I was like, ‘We’re doing a kalimba record!’” Brock laughs. “Lasted for maybe a few songs, then my thumbs hurt and I wanted to play guitar again.”
If you thought the album’s big single “We Are Between” or the motor-mouthed “Transmitting Receiving” might offer an easy festival singalong, think again. “It was both frustrating and fun,” he says of writing it. “Like puzzles are fun, but if you’ve got a million little pieces and it’s all sky? It’s fucking frustrating.”
And then there’s the UFOs. Of course there are UFOs. “I saw the Phoenix Lights in ’97 — Google it,” Brock dares. These days, he’s happy to lean into the tinfoil. “I got gang stalked at one point. That turned into something else. A retired Navy SEAL buddy referred me to a remote viewer — yeah, like Third Eye Spies shit. Supposedly, there’s four alien bases under mountains. Helicopters fly into them. It’s wild.”
You’d think Brock might want to keep that to himself. “I’ve got a section of what most of my conversation just falls into the tinfoil hat category. So I kinda keep it away from the likes of you,” he tells me. But he’s also not sorry for dragging it into Modest Mouse’s big cosmic transmission. “If you pull one thing out, the whole thing collapses — crazy word Jenga,” he says, tipping a hat to Dylan’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues” lineage.
There’s no plan to fix the broken parts of the tour industry, either. “I was done being an eight-piece band. I’m shrinking it. It’s time to tighten,” Brock shrugs, ever the survivalist. “Before the pandemic, I almost bought a fleet of Tesla semis for touring. Good thing I didn’t — they’d still be sitting there.”
And what about that mythical album he promised after Strangers to Ourselves? He still has it. He still likes it. Maybe you’ll get it “at some point, in eternity,” he laughs.
Listen to the interview above and then check out We Are Between.
