Just four years after releasing their “final” album and breaking up, Frog Eyes are back. The Vancouver indie-rock greats are releasing their new album The Bees next month, and we’ve already heard one song from it, “When You Turn The Light On.” Today, we’re getting another single called “I Was An Oligarch,” which is a definitely a Frog Eyes song title. As frontman Carey Mercer explains:

The song comes from considering a very specific and rarified stretch of time in my life. I was 19, 20, 21.

Part of the song is about the unbridled joy I would feel before leaving the house, the giddiness of anticipation. I didn’t care that much about music in those days—I might have had ten tapes that I would listen to while painting, mostly recordings of Brave New Waves for day-time listening if I felt okay enough to paint. Everyone else had music, they were always playing it. I did love to go to little concerts at this sports bar, in part to mess with the band, to tear them down from their vaunted 8” stage in the corner of the sports bar, to disrupt their set and somehow, in my thinking, become one with them, to ascend like some little oligarch. And then, somehow I had 200$, some kind of gov’t initiative, and I bought this Aria Pro II hollow-body guitar from my best friend’s uncle Denny and, regrettably, or blessedly, became one of them.

Derek Janzen, who directed the accompanying lyric video, adds:

The main thing I wanted for this video was to try to juxtapose the driving rhythm of the song by holding on shots a bit longer and keeping the motion in frame to a minimum. I was fortunate enough to film in an old house near Deer Lake in Burnaby that my friend and fellow musician, Nicholas Krgovich, was staying in that looked perfect for what I was after. The hope is that these ghostly wafts of smoke within this empty home represent a sort of haze of memory that I think Carey’s lyrics so wonderfully portray in the song.

Watch and listen below.

The Bees is out 4/29 via Paper Bag.