Nada Surf has signed to New West Records and will release its anticipated new LP, Moon Mirror on September 13, 2024. The 11-song set was produced by the band with Ian Laughton (Supergrass, Ash) and recorded at the legendary Rockfield Studios in Monmouthshire, Wales. Moon Mirror is Nada Surf’s first album in four years and marks the 30th anniversary of their debut single, “The Plan”/“Telescope.”
A thrilling and moving leap forward for Nada Surf, Moon Mirror is true to the human experience—as meaningful and mysterious and sometimes absurd as it is. These new songs thrum with love, grief, deep loneliness, doubt, wonder, and hope. There is hard-won wisdom and hard-won belief in possibility. It has everything fans love and expect from the band: play-on-repeat heart punches, poetic and thought-provoking musings on the world around them, and bittersweet anthems that begin quietly but explode into soaring harmonies.
Today, the band released the first single, “In Front of Me Now,” a heartfelt warning against sleepwalking through the one life we have. “Why wasn’t I present?” frontman Matthew Caws asks himself. “I could have been living.” On the chorus he promises himself, “Today I do what’s in front of me now.”
Caws says, “Every time we make an album, I’m asked (and ask myself) what it’s about. I never know how to answer that question. I’m still trying to figure everything out, and that’s probably as close to a theme as there is. Looking back over the years, I know what our songs are about in theory: trying to reach acceptance (of circumstances, of oneself, of others), connection, a constant search for possibility and the bright side, a willingness to change, forgiveness, curiosity, checking in with one’s mortality, motivations and judgements, etc. But in the moment when making one up, I have no idea what I’m doing and maybe that’s ok. I’m just trying to stay honest with myself and take my best guess at making sense of the world.” Of their new label home, he says “We’ve been lucky to be on some really wonderful record labels over the years, and so far New West sure feels like another one of those. We couldn’t be more fortunate.”
Long hailed as a must-see live act, Nada Surf has announced the first legs of their 2024 Moon Mirror world tour. Launching on October 2 in Washington, DC, the US tour features an appearance at the When We Were Young Festival in Las Vegas, where they will perform their 2002 fan favorite Let Go in its entirety. Supporting the US dates will be their New West labelmates, the acclaimed New Zealand-based indie-rock band Office Dog. The European leg of the tour will launch on November 14 in Madrid. Please see tour dates, with more to be added, below.
Nada Surf formed in New York City in 1992 and released their debut single, “The Plan”/“Telescope” in 1994. They signed to Elektra Records and released their first full-length High/Low in 1996. Produced by Ric Ocasek of the Cars, High/Low was an instant hit based on the massive success of its lead single “Popular,” but the band truly hit its stride in the 2000s, starting with the release of 2002’s Let Go. Anthemic, catchy, yet emotionally knotty, that album won them new fans and greater acclaim, and they built on both with each subsequent release, including 2005’s melancholic The Weight Is a Gift and the bone-raw The Stars Are Indifferent to Astronomy. Rather than summarize their celebrated career with a traditional greatest hits package, on 2016’s Peaceful Ghosts they recorded some of their most popular songs alongside the Deutsches Filmorchester Babelsberg, one of the only remaining film orchestras in Western Europe.
For most of the band’s thirty years, Nada Surf has had the same core lineup: Matthew Caws (vocals, guitar), Daniel Lorca (bass, vocals), and Ira Elliot (drums). On Moon Mirror, they are joined by their friend and longtime collaborator, Louie Lino.
Moon Mirror track listing:
1. Second Skin
2. In Front of Me Now
3. Moon Mirror
4. Losing
5. Intel and Dreams
6. The One You Want
7. New Propeller
8. Open Seas
9. X Is You
10. Give Me the Sun
11. Floater
SHARE NADA SURF’S “IN FRONT OF ME NOW” VIDEO DIRECTED BY NEILSON HUBBARD & JOSHUA BRITT
