Bright Eyes - Down In The Weeds, Where The World Once Was

Down In The Weeds, Where The World Once Was is the tenth studio album by American indie rock band Bright Eyes, released in August 2020 via Dead Oceans.

Bright Eyes is an American indie rock band founded by singer songwriter and guitarist Conor Oberst. The band consists of Oberst, multi-instrumentalist and producer Mike Mogis, trumpet and piano player Nate Walcott, and a rotating lineup of collaborators drawn primarily from Omaha's indie music scene.

In January 2020 the band announced that they have signed a new record deal with Dead Oceans and are working on new material.

Bright Eyes tenth studio album and first release since 2011, Down In The Weeds, Where The World Once Was is an enormous record caught in the profound in-between of grief and clarity - one arm wrestling its demons, the other gripping the hand of love, in spite of it.

The end of Bright Eyes unofficial hiatus came naturally. Conor Oberst pitched the idea of getting the band back together during a 2017 Christmas party at Bright Eyes bandmate Nathaniel Walcott’s Los Angeles home. The two huddled in the bathroom and called Mike Mogis, who was Christmas shopping at an Omaha mall. Mogis immediately said yes. There was no specific catalyst for the trio, aside from finding comfort amidst a decade of brutal change.

The resulting Bright Eyes album came together unlike any other of its predecessors. ‘Down in the Weeds, Where the World Once Was’ is Bright Eyes’ most collaborative, stemming from only one demo and written in stints in Omaha and in bits and pieces in Walcott’s Los Angeles home. Radically altering a writing process 25 years into a project seems daunting but Oberst said there was no trepidation: “Our history and our friendship, and my trust level with them, is so complete and deep. And I wanted it to feel as much like a three-headed monster as possible.”

Down in the Weeds, Where the World Once Was is a distillation of a prolific, enduring canon. It’s immediate and urgent, the product of its creators’ growth across a decade apart, as well as the need to make a record together to find solace from loss.

Through deliberate, fearless experimentation in process, the trio made the truest Bright Eyes sound: the sound of a deep bond, of a band coming home but also a seamless continuation, like Bright Eyes never went away. It’s the impossible, sprawling mess of human experience that Bright Eyes has always sought to put to tape, since the beginning - the sound of holding on.

This double album 2LP record set is on transparent red (LP1) and transparent orange (LP2) coloured vinyl housed in a die-cut outer sleeve with etching on Side D, a printed insert and download code, pressed in the US via Dead Oceans.