Modest Mouse at Arizona Financial Theatre

Having recently completed a sold out 25th anniversary tour for their breakthrough album, 1997’s and played a summer ’23 run with Pixies and Cat Power, Modest Mouse continues to prove themselves to be one of the most consistent live acts today. Modest Mouse released their highly anticipated new album, , on June 25, 2021 via Epic Records. The Golden Casket heralds another new chapter in the GRAMMY® Award-nominated multi platinum band’s unpredictable evolution. Produced with Dave Sardy and Jacknife Lee in Los Angeles and in Modest Mouse’s studio in Portland, the album hovers in the liminal space between raw punk power and experimental studio science, frontman Isaac Brock explores themes ranging from the degradation of our psychic landscapes and invisible technology, to fatherhood. The twelve tracks behave like amorphous organisms, undergoing dramatic mutations and mood swings that speak to the chronic tug-of-war between hope and despair that plays out in Brock’s head.

Fishtailing across a trimmed sod lawn, the parking lot of a box-store strip mall, a fast food drive-thru––it’s a hyperreal Americana fantasy that calls Caroline Rose (she/they) home on Gentling the Horse at the Walt Whitman Mall. The release doubles as the debut of SUCK records, the LA based artist’s own imprint—a fitting next form for an enigmatic musician whose work resists settling into one shape.

Gentling the Horse at the Walt Whitman Mall stretches the ordinary into the uncanny. The record pairs sharply observed, memoiristic songwriting with expansive guitar textures that render the everyday with violent clarity and mythic scale. Beneath its melodic sweep and signature hooks runs a current of violence and American dream leakage.

It’s Ennio Morricone with an AR15: surf guitars, spaghetti westerns, and suburban dread colliding until they become their own sharp vernacular. Reality is unstable, so we’ll keep telling stories—and for Rose, the sinister slickness of the everyday grows a new head.

Working with producer John Congleton, Rose built the record through humor, layering, and instinct rather than polish. Songs like “Conversations with Shiv,” “Goddamn Train,” and “Everything in its Right Place” were recorded in studio for the first time, with sessions that prized first impulses over perfection. The result is panoramic but never precious—songs that feel meticulously constructed while always threatening to mutate.