Menomena Announce Reunion Show, Share Surprise EP The Insulation
It’s been a very long time since we’ve heard from Menomena, the inventive Portland art-rock project who released a bunch of cult-beloved albums in the ’00s. Menomena hadn’t released anything since “Toomer,” the early-2013 single that was recorded during the same sessions as their 2012 album Moms. But today they have a new three-song EP called The Insulation.
The Insulation arrived on Bandcamp this morning without any statement from the band. As Pitchfork points out, each of the three songs on The Insulation has a different Menomena member on lead vocals. They all date back to the sessions for 2010’s Mines but were not on streaming until today. Along with the music comes news of an Aug 10 reunion show at Portland’s Revolution Hall. It’ll be the band’s first show in a decade.
Menomena never officially broke up, but they’ve been on pause since 2013. Since then, Brent Knopf formed the duo El Vy with the National’s Matt Berninger, and Danny Seim made music with a different member of the National, drummer Bryan Devendorf, in the band Pfarmers. The songs on The Insulation definitely capture a bygone period of ambitiously structured and layered indie-pop. Stream the EP below.