There’s a theory in physics — the idea that past, present, and future all exist simultaneously, and that the passage of time itself is an illusion. It’s also the best way to understand An Eraser and a Maze, because you can hear every era of Modest Mouse coexisting at once on it. Past, present and future — none of it retreading the past, just existing simultaneously.

That’s probably no surprise given the creative ether from which it all springs. Isaac Brock’s process is beyond anyone’s grasp, including his own. He just gets out of the way. As he puts it, “The awake part of my brain isn’t even really involved. There’s an entire different factory in my head that does the good shit.” The result is a record that feels familiar and alien at once — warm, yet cold. Surprising, even confounding at points, in the best possible way.

Sonically, the album spans the full arc of the band’s catalog. “Absolutely Necessary Never” takes the DNA of “Tiny Cities Made of Ashes” — and happens to be a new Modest Mouse classic. “Speak ‘N Spell (Or Not)” feels like a hybrid between early-era guitar work and the bombastic choruses of Good News for People Who Love Bad News. The stripped-down moments hit hardest: “Dogbed in Heaven/Give It a Skeleton” wouldn’t have felt out of place on Ugly Casanova’s Sharpen Your Teeth, while “Remember Yourself” finds Brock singing to a quiet fingerpicked guitar, raw and unguarded. “Third Side of the Moon,” meanwhile, is cold and stark, warm and human — somehow both at once.

The players themselves hail from various eras of the band. Late founding drummer Jeremiah Green appears in a sample, his presence haunting the record throughout — and not just sonically. Having lost several close people over the past few years, Brock had been thinking about mortality. The record’s liner notes detail a dedication to Green alongside others: Rob Laakso, Sam Jayne, Scott Kane, Sean Foley. As Brock said following Green’s death in late 2022, “I imagine there’s going to be a ghost in the house for quite a while.”

Modest Mouse began working on this collection immediately following The Golden Casket.

Where that record was an attempt to manufacture post-pandemic silver linings, An Eraser and a Maze takes a different approach. “For this one, I just tried being real honest with myself,” Brock says. He hopes those who’ve experienced loss find something useful here — not something “glibly optimistic,” nor “this is my darkest hour.” Something harder to name.

An Eraser and a Maze might mark the end of a timeline, or the start of one, or maybe both at once. It feels familiar and warm, yet wholly alien in a cold world. And in a past, present, and future that often feel devoid of surprise and the brilliance of contradiction, thank god for Modest Mouse.