Phil Elverum is no stranger to misery. His long career as an indie–rock storyteller began with the band D+, before he shot to prominence with The Microphones, singing about the impermanence of life in breathy tones over hot, oppressive instrumentals.
Since 2003, however, Elverum has consistently released music under the name Mount Eerie, which has seen him take a turn towards more traditional indie folk. But the Elverum of Night Palace is not the same man who put out The Glow, Pt. 2. His incomplete break with his past work began with 2017’s A Crow Looked at Me, written after the death of his wife Genevieve Castrée, which saw him eschew flowery metaphors and heavy symbolism in favor of more stripped–down and direct lyricism. Mount Eerie’s newest project, Night Palace, is both a continuation of and a departure from this new trajectory, with his lyrics returning to their esoteric roots while maintaining their focus on concrete miseries.
Night Palace begins with a warm hum and crackle that’ll be familiar to listeners of The Microphones, enveloping them in a fog of droning sound and dragging them into Elverum’s world. “Sad” is the wrong word to describe the album—Night Palace reads more like Elverum taking stock of his life, reflecting on his highs and coming to terms with his lows.
In a Substack post that accompanied the album’s release, he writes that “I have traveled through decades of fluctuations, swinging between the concrete and the mystical… now [I’m] washed up on a shore in what I’m pretty sure is an authentic state of peace.” Despite how intensely personal the project is, Elverum seeks to give his music a life of its own, apart from the burden of being associated with him—“Yes, I wrote these things. So what? Don’t look at me.”
Standing at the end of the road so far, the album is saddled with the onerous task of making sense of 25 years of emotions. “These songs point at a moment of release, of peace found in a non–intellectual lightning strike after long waves of turmoil and surrender.”
Night Palace is a story in four parts. The first section of the album is varied and free–flowing, both sonically and thematically—while all serve as reflections on Elverum’s present, they express contradictory aspects of his feelings, from the affirmations of love in “My Canopy” to acceptance of his own mortality on “Broom of Wind”. After beginning to lament human inadequacy on “Empty Paper Tower Roll,” (“Can I abandon this position? / See beyond my little life”), the album takes a turn outward, returning to the nature motifs that have often characterized Elverum’s previous work. The tension between the impermanent body and the immortal natural world is the animating force behind Night Palace—but despite the conflict, these meditations on nature ultimately serve as conduits to express something deeply human, such as the limits of our ability to comprehend the world on “I Spoke With A Fish.”
The album makes a strange turn with “Non–Metaphorical Decolonization,” the track that launches Elverum’s pseudo–commentary on politics by lamenting the genocides that America was built upon (“This ‘America,’ the old idea, I want it to die”). Wealth inequality and ecocide are addressed with surprising bluntness on “November Rain” and “Co–Owner of Trees” respectively. Occasionally, this bluntness pays off—far more often, however, Elverum seems to stumble over his own words. Mount Eerie’s vocal stylings have never been particularly refined—everything he says is matter of fact, more spoken than sung. While this has always worked well to underscore Eleverum’s personal musings, the strange juxtaposition of his soft, frank vocals with vague lyrics about the climate crisis makes Night Palace a difficult project to place politically. Though attempting to grapple with the concrete problems facing the world today, Elverum’s turn outward quickly lapses into a turn back inward, albeit a more troubled one.
Elverum’s political music relapses into a meditation on the guilt he feels for living through catastrophe, rather than any true commentary on these catastrophes themselves. It is hard not to see Elverum’s project as continuing to embody the kind of hand–wringing introspection it simultaneously condemns. The section concludes with a return to nature imagery on “& Sun”—describing the weight of the world upon him, Elverum gasps that “the sun that shined on the anciеnts … binds me for all time to all of evеrything.”
The album’s final three tracks witness the tensions that run deep within Night Palace erupt into the open. “Stone Woman Gives Birth to a Child at Night” offers some brief musings on the role of the musician as commentator, but it is really on the 12–minute spoken–word “Demolition” that the album comes to a head. More a confessional than a song, “Demolition” captures Elverum on his knees, attempting to come to terms with his guilt at living comfortably in a collapsing world. Though imprecise as a political project, Night Palace, particularly at its conclusion, shows its value in viscerally capturing the felt experience of living in a world that seems to have no future. The echo that Elverum hears from the world around him—"There's wars. This peace you breathe is flimsy. We rule."—is the cracking of the facade of calm that allows society to justify itself.
The core contradiction of Night Palace finally comes to the forefront—the infinite horrors surrounding us and the infinite resignation of all who have the privilege to ignore them (a privilege shared by Elverum himself). The question that orients his panic—“Who do we think we are to be doing this here; now?”—goes unanswered. The album’s closing, “I Need New Eyes,” offers us the nearest thing the project has to a thesis statement. If the work of The Microphones was about the impermanence of flesh (a somewhat value–neutral sentiment), Night Palace makes clear that the flesh is failure—weak and myopic, bound only to itself, incapable of doing what it takes to reshape a turbulent world. Elverum laments that all his attempts to grapple with his struggles as an individual have left him blind to “the constant catastrophes [that] pound on the wall.” A bitter note to end on—but this is a bitter album.
Sonically, Night Palace is far enough from Mount Eerie’s previous work to maintain Elverum’s innovative streak. An indie–folk record punctuated by the occasional jarring buzz or crash, it slots neatly into the rest of Mount Eerie’s discography, but differentiates itself from records past through its surprising moments of polish and modernity. The clean guitar riffs that play over “Empty Paper Towel Roll” and “I Saw Another Bird” are reminiscent of such modern indie guitarists as MJ Lenderman or Julien Baker, while the harmonic background vocals on tracks like “Blurred World” help recapture the folk essence that has characterized Mount Eerie since Elverum’s rebrand.
As a whole, the project still stacks up rather unfavorably to Elverum’s previous work with The Microphones, which delicately interwove soft vocals with hard, droning instrumentals and wasn’t afraid to jar listeners with risky musical choices. Night Palace feels far safer by comparison—though promisingly scattershot in its first section (the soft chants of “Breaths” slide without warning into 40 seconds of panicked screaming in “Swallowed Alive”), the album quickly settles into an emotional indie groove, dominated by meandering guitars and soft vocals until its final three–track explosion point.
What it retains, however, is the arcane lyricism that has always defined Elverum’s music, now refashioned into a tool of panicked critique. Where the album falters is its attempts to describe the concrete crises of our moment with the same mystical fervor usually reserved for powerful meditations on personal grief.
Elverum recognizes the limits of this imagery itself, writing that “I don’t want to soothe…the stakes are too high. My hope is someone out there will hear past the distracting nature picture I keep accidentally describing and get prodded by the ideas beneath.” Trapped within the imagery of the natural world, Elverum’s lyrics are beautiful and resonant, yet lack the precision to capture the plight of modern life the way it hopes to. In the end, Night Palace is replete with gestures towards some meaning that lies beyond its comprehension—a failing it remains painfully aware of (from “Writing Poems,” which includes the lyric “a poem only barely says the thing halfway”).
Given the vast thematic territory it traverses, it seems wrong to call Night Palace a political project—that being said, the politics that underpin the project are inescapable. Its message is a muddled one, appearing oriented towards resignation but at points shockingly hopeful (“There is another world inside this one / It shines”). When read as descriptive rather than prescriptive, the songs that make up Night Palace mirror the world whose essence they seek to channel—rough around the edges, uncertain, and largely undirected. Despite its awkward attempts at grasping politics, the inner truth—intentional or not—of Night Palace is that the horrors it tries to capture don’t appear to us as horrors at all. Elverum’s story is not one of catastrophe, but of a slow and soft decline. There is no crash or scream to wake us from our stupor, just the creeping guilt of living as things go on as they are. Elverum’s message to his audience is frustrating, though true—we don’t know where to go from here, but we certainly can’t stay much longer.
