Modern Nature released their new album The Heat Warps last year to widespread acclaim. The new collection is a deceivingly encouraging collection through which Jack Cooper – the band’s main creative force – continues to explore themes of collectivism, our relationship with the natural world, the weight of consciousness with more directness and purpose.
The quartet is on tour, and they perform live in DC at DC9 on Thursday, Jan. 22.
In honor of the band’s extensive North American tour, the band has unearthed new single “Shasta” inspired by the California landscape.
Jack shared, “I wrote the words to this song when I was looking out the window driving through Northern California in 2024. For about an hour of the drive Mount Shasta loomed in the distance. Obscured by silhouettes of pine, mist and steamy van windows. It looked like Mount Doom. A lot of The Heat Warps words were written whilst looking out of a van window. Shasta didn’t quite make the record. At the time I felt it didn’t quite fit and changed the flow of the album. Important things! In the intervening months, I’ve revisited it and seen something in it that I didn’t at the time. It’s on a flexi-disc that came with a special edition of the album, but I wanted everyone to hear it. So to coincide with our West Coast shows that begin a stones throw from Shasta in Arcata…here it is.”
Stream “Shasta” by Modern Nature on YouTube:
For all the grimmer realities of 2025 that the new album wrestles with, it is ultimately not a record entirely consumed by anxieties. The refreshingly optimistic record’s themes and lyrics are directed toward the community they’ve built in their immediate life and with their fans who are “struggling to reconcile how they fit into an increasingly cruel world.” It acts as a siren call to the community to double down with the hope that making an album that’s open, uplifting and ambitious is in itself can be part of the solution.
The Heat Warps features the core trio of Jack Cooper (vocals, guitar), Jim Wallis (drums), and Jeff Tobias (bass guitar) augmented by a new guitarist — Tara Cunningham. Be sure to catch Modern Nature on tour!
Modern Nature
W/ Brigid Dawson & The Mothers Network
DC9
Thursday, Jan. 22
Doors @ 7pm
$23.28
All ages
