In the notes to their first album, How to Live (2019), Modern Nature’s guitarist, producer, singer, and principal composer Jack Cooper locates the band’s name and interests in the “friction”, the “electric aura” that sparks where city and country meet, “As factories give way to fields, and highways drift into gravelly roads… the way a nuclear power station sits next to open grasslands.” It’s a vision that, at times, inspires a trancelike motion and, at times, leads to tedium, such as the endless verges between highway corridors and monoculture forests.
However, when the sparks flare into something more, as they often do in Modern Nature‘s music, the songs lead somewhere else entirely, unexpected vistas that partake of ancient folk, ambient and drone, English progressive rock, the post-rock fusion of punk with jazz, slowcore, and inklings of early British and recent American freak folk. Despite the inherent risks of dwelling in a postindustrial landscape, on The Heat Warps, it’s mostly a good place to be, a tense dialectic they wisely refuse to synthesize into fixity.
Given such conceptual origins, it’s not surprising that the first words of the eponymous first song on their debut EP, Nature (2019), were “modern nature”. Or that the third and fourth words, fittingly, were “great failure”. That’s what happens when you set up camp somewhere no one is really comfortable being, even if most of us already live there. However, Modern Nature don’t just want to tell us how awful our neoliberal wasteland has become; they want to provide music to make sense of, survive in, and even, dare we say, transform that wasteland into something more than just the pale afterimage of a lost world they’re still yearning for.
This grander ambition is evident in the single, “Supernature“, they chose for the EP—if a nearly 12-minute folk-jazz jam can rightly be termed a single. A Celtic drone opens the song, lulling the listener past lyrics barely audible in the mix or Cooper’s delivery, except for the frequent refrain of “nature,” acoustic drums, guitar, cello, and Will Young’s organ. Jeff Tobias’s blaring alto saxophone eventually shifts us into driving jazz-prog improvisation, à la the early 1970s Soft Machine, with the droning rhythms sticking around for the ride. The second verses reappear unexpectedly seven minutes in, fighting for our attention with the sax. Rupert Gillett’s cello leads us into the dissonant, free-jazz outro.
The band’s personnel has turned over since then, and the songs on Modern Nature’s new release, The Heat Warps, their fourth full-length, lean closer to the indie folk-rock of “Nature” than the droning blowout of “Supernature”, but its best moments, like those on their noteworthy second album Island of Noise (2022), find the sweet spot between them.
They sound rockier, with new electric guitarist Tara Cunningham, Tobias playing bass instead of reeds, and Jim Wallace on the occasional dulcimer in addition to drums and percussion, alongside Cooper’s electric guitar and organ. Unlike frequently cited influences such as Talk Talk and Radiohead, Modern Nature’s folk-based rhythms mostly eschew blues forms, and the jazz-prog, when it manifests, sounds modal rather than chord-based. The results sound both intensely familiar and indelibly strange.
Rather than extremes like extended Island of Noise closer “Build“, where “the idea… is to kind of break it down to a sort/sum of components so that’s why it is so metronomic and everyone especially on the choruses (except for [saxophonist] Evan [Parker]) is playing one note,” or No Fixed Point in Space, their aptly titled 2023 experiment in dispensing with pop forms altogether, the songs on The Heat Warps want to see what happens if you try to work within those forms, making them do what you need them to do rather than vice versa. “Every day we’re confronted with a confusing and scary world,” Cooper explains, “but my own world view was defined and influenced by art and artists who weren’t afraid to highlight and offer solutions: Public Enemy, the Smiths, and a wider American counterculture.”
I don’t hear much of those bands directly on The Heat Warps, so much as I listen to them in the shared desire to make music that can reach a broad audience precisely through its refusal to compromise with that audience. It’s a difficult needle to thread, and those bands were as combustible as the counterculture Cooper also mentions. That combustibility may explain the album’s enigmatic title—I can’t even tell if “warps” is meant to be a noun or a verb—which evokes the Kryponite of otherwise durable vinyl, one of Modern Nature’s retro touchstones, but also more figuratively the effects of a heating world and its warped leaders, “the men we’re conditioned to respect and follow”, like the ones in lead single and album opener “Pharaoh“.
It’s there in the warning chorus of the brooding “Radio”: “There’s a fire all around / There’s a fever in the air”, a burst of melody out of a slow burn of a song. “Radio” sings of something more than just a world on fire, though; it reminds us of the green shoots that emerge from soil seared by forest fires. Nevertheless, this is modern nature, and there’s no predictable, natural course; it’s impossible to tell if the order of the lines “Springs into green / Burns where it’s been” is natural or inverted, fire destroying what’s left of the natural world or fire creating space for its rejuvenation.
Modern Nature’s propensity for single-word song titles has persisted from the beginning, heightening the willful ambiguity of their music, the tension between what we expect and the other ways it might be understood or perceived. That song about fire, it’s called “Radio”. Perhaps there’s a radio emanating from the second and fourth verses, “Phasing softly the air / In waves.” I can’t rightly say. What I can say is that for the first time on this album, Cooper’s vocals are high in the mix the way they are in pop songs and folk rock, rather than buried in a lo-fi indie hush or a jazz-drone that hears them more as another instrument than something we need to understand to get the music.
It’s not that Modern Nature haven’t sounded urgent from the get-go. Now, the urgency feels both lyrical and musical, a desire to communicate as much as to broadcast. “There’s me standing in the riot / We’re singing in the lanes, we’re overtired / It feels new to me, it’s all history / There’s me standing in the riot,” Cooper sings on the chorus to the second single and album centerpiece “Source”, set during the far-right 2024 UK asylum riots. It could almost be an anti-Kinks chorus, reversing Ray Davies‘ pining for the Village Green or “Victoria“, his ironic paean to a vanished empire, the way Cooper croons it out from the deliberative reflection of the surrounding verses.
No matter how urgent things are throughout the album, the band resolutely refuse to accelerate. Listen to the guitar break following the first chorus, leaning into the pauses as much as the notes: an urgent message delivered without panic, with no hurry. It’s not that there’s no melody here, either, but that each guitar is playing on a different background loop before the voice insists on layering some collective harmony over the differently chiming parts, even as it’s justifiably wary of the collective history it finds itself caught in the middle of. The guitar outro, bending notes with passion, similarly insists on knitting something together out of that miserable riot, except that it fades slowly in quality as if from Cooper’s studio into someone’s lo-fi radio, still sounding in the background.
There are unexpected nods everywhere to the musical past—from the way the music behind the chorus of “Radio” borrows the bridge from Porcupine Tree‘s neo-prog epic “Arriving Somewhere But Not Here” to the literal quote from the most famous hard-rock song in history—”There’s a feeling I get when I look to the West”—that seem determined to bring pop mythology somehow down to earth, back to nature. Except that, in the counterculture envisioned by this band, going back to nature is nothing straightforward, nothing simple; it’s just a different kind of complexity. “And the light there hits my eyes / It makes me glow inside / It spins my head around,” “Jetty” continues, on an album full not just of musical spinning and looping and turning, but of lyrical revolutions, too.
Titles like “Totality” and “Zoology”, the last and third-to-last songs, don’t promise a lot lyrically or musically; they sound more like something you were forced to study in school. Titles like these simply can’t deliver what they promise. However, they still deliver a lot, embracing their clunkiness, limning the ways they fall short, inviting the listener into a world, too, that will never deliver what it should. Both titles come during the chorus, where, again, the loping verses and slow-grooving music bloom into melody and striving. Lyrically, the chorus is yet another modern nature dialectic, the human science of natural beings paired with what living creatures naturally do: “Zoology, broken on the sand / Zoology, spinning in the air / Zoology, swaying with the tide / Zoology, waiting by the sides.”
Just as humans, we’re both inside and outside the entirety of nature. As thinking beings, we are both inside and outside the concept of totality, able to imagine it only because we aren’t quite part of it. “A sour dream reeling me,” Cooper concludes, a fish caught on a hook trying to swallow it all, “Spinning up / Colouring / Hoping for totality.” Who’s caught, who’s doing the catching, who’s the subject-object of history that, for any good Marxist, is both the engine of totality and the reminder that it’s an impossible dream?
Another unanswerable question, but whether it’s also a sour dream all depends on the degree to which one does or doesn’t accept that it’s worth striving for the impossible when you know it’s out of reach, that the only good totality is the one you never foreclose, the only effective dialectic the one that never resolves into itself, remaining endlessly in tension, song to song, album to album.
“There’s an indelible feeling of constant forward motion,” explain the notes to How to Live. “It’s as if the band is laying down a railway and riding it simultaneously, and you can hear all kinds of landscapes passing by.” How do you distinguish between the heedless progress of modernity and the progressive building of “constant forward motion”? Between the endless repetition of highway verges and those meeting points between nature and modernity, where the future actually sparks into an existence we might want?
Between the kind of spinning that makes you dizzy and the kind of spinning that propels you forward to arrive somewhere that’s not here? Musically and lyrically, The Heat Warps is a fabulously compelling questioning album, and the questions it’s asking are not the ones you expect to hear from a pop album. Among its many strengths is the clear sense that Modern Nature don’t know the answers either; instead, they’re probing for the right questions, the ones that might lead us there.