The best power-pop band currently intact and residing on this planet, Nada Surf has settled into a comfortable midlife groove of late, pumping out a handful of exceptional albums that resonate on a number of levels without straying far from its signature sound. Moon Mirror (New West), the group’s 10th proper studio LP, offers super-sized hooks, crafty, nuanced songwriting from Matthew Cawes and a rhythm section—bassist Daniel Lorca and drummer Ira Elloit—that’s never sounded more locked in. Louie Lino, Nada Surf’s newest member, also steps up, contributing “Losing,” one of Moon Mirror’s best tracks.
Cawes recently fielded our questions. Also check out the premiere of the video for Moon Mirror’s leadoff track, “Second Skin,” below.
You began working with Ian Laughton on the last album (2020’s Never Not Together), and that relationship continues on Moon Mirror. What has he brought to the table in terms of the group’s sound?
Ian has been our live engineer and tour manager in Europe for over 20 years. He has a holistic, producer-like approach to concerts. He’s funny, full of great stories and helps keep morale high and light. Sonically, he’s great at reading the room, both in terms of what will work well with the space—enough low-end to feel full but not so much that it gets muddy—and what volume will work well with the audience that night. He has great taste and a sense of adventure, and these are all skills and qualities that carry over to album-making. He’s a kind of a rock Zelig, having worked with a lot of groups right as they were finding their way: the Verve, Ash, Florence + The Machine, Two Door Cinema Club, countless others. It’s like having an extra band member with a little extra dose of outside objectivity, which is the ideal. Bonus trivia: His great-uncle is Charles Laughton, who played Captain Bligh in Mutiny On The Bounty and later directed the noir classic The Night Of The Hunter.
Rockfield Studios has quite a mystique. What was the experience like in Wales this time?
It was great to go back. Many of our favorite albums were made there. There are so many to choose from, but the ones that have a real impact for me are the first three Echo & The Bunnymen albums and the Flamin’ Groovies’ Shake Some Action. It definitely ups the sense of romance and possibility. When you’re walking in the bright winter air from the accommodations to the old stone coach house where the studio is, trying to gauge whether you really believe in the bridge you’ve just written to complete a song, that sense of history helps you stay on mission.
The owner, Kingsley Ward, still does farm work and likes to drop in on a session and tell stories. All work stops then, but it’s always worth it. The studio is a 35-minute walk from Monmouth, and I liked to go there in the morning to have a coffee and clear my head. I couldn’t quite justify the time away every day, so I looked on the local Craigslist equivalent and found a cheap bicycle. It was the dead of winter, so I’d wear an extra hoodie under my coat and go slowly over the patches of snow.
Louie Lino’s “Losing” fits so perfectly on Moon Mirror. How did it wind up making the cut?
We were sitting around Daniel’s house waiting for band practice to start and playing each other demos and tracks on our laptops. “Losing” leapt out of the speakers at me. It’s so beautifully written, especially the chorus. We started playing it together that afternoon, and it came together quickly. I added an eight-second bridge. Other than that, it’s unchanged. Louie and I both threw our respective kitchen sinks at the recording later—he with synth strings, and me with some layers of early Teenage Fanclub and My Bloody Valentine octave bends. Mixer John Goodmanson did a wonderful job of making room for both of those elements without overloading the sound. It still has clarity somehow. John is a miracle-worker.
“New Propeller” is another standout. The video lends a powerful visual element to this free-floating fear many of us have of being overwhelmed—or “erased”—by technology. Yet the overall vibe of the song is one of reassurance. Talk a bit about the inspiration for the song and how the video came about.
I was thinking about how the MAGA world was a new destabilizing presence in American society and politics. I pictured a huge cruise-ship propeller and roiling water above it. At first, with the line, “You won’t be replaced,” I was thinking about the paranoia some people have that demographic change threatens them. I was thinking in the simplest and most obvious terms: You’re here, you’re living your life, and you will complete it as yourself. But the song runs on another parallel track about how we’re migrating into a virtual world and how automation in factories and retail—and now AI—are making some worrying changes in the workforce. I’m so glad that you get a vibe of reassurance. There’s so much to be anxious about, but we need to take care of ourselves, breathe and hold on to positivity and hope.
Mark Pellington made a beautiful, expansive video for “Just Wait”—a 10-minute “music film” that included some meditations by my father. He asked to hear the new album and not only zeroed in on “New Propeller” but really picked up on that second aspect of the song. We were on a deadline, but he dove into it and, with the help of a lot of willing collaborators, pulled together an amazing piece of work very quickly.
After 30 years and 10 studio albums, Nada Surf has settled into a groove that never seems to wear thin. Would it be too much of a stretch to call it a winning formula?
I’m very happy you call it a winning formula. That being said, I can’t claim that there really is one. I just start messing around with a guitar and singing about whatever I’m thinking. There are exceptions, where a concept comes to me first and I set out to illustrate it. But more often than not, it’s something like, “I’m having feelings, I’m not sure I understand them, but I’m curious. Let me start making something and see if I can figure it out.” Of course, another crucial element is that Ira and Daniel, and now Louie also, keep coming up with killer parts and performances album after album.
—Hobart Rowland
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