Frog Eyes Are Thriving in Their Own Silo

Singer-guitarist Carey Mercer mines his memories, creating a sense of time and place.

by Leslie Ken Chu

Photo by Solomon Chiniquay

Published on March 5, 2025

“Everything feels the same everywhere you go,” Carey Mercer says, observing the impact of digital life on our urban landscape. “Every city has the same record stores with the same stocked records, and every city has the same bookstores with the same stocked books.” Even the average urban coffee shop succumbs to this flattening, its furnishings sparse, decor colourless, and clientele fashionable, nuzzling a laptop screen. “But that’s just the way everyone is tapping into the same monoculture, and so am I,” the Frog Eyes singer-guitarist admits.

That makes two of us. I meet Mercer at one such East Van coffee shop to discuss the Vancouver rock quartet’s tenth album, The Open Up (out March 7 via Paper Bag Records). During our conversation, Mercer lauds the resilience of one particular institution, the artist-run centre. “It’s so site-specific, and it has its own traditions that are deeply rooted,” he says. “Its relationship to capital is different. Its primary function isn’t to sell things; it’s to document something that’s been happening within the city.”

As Mercer and I later amble through Mount Pleasant, his appraisal of artist-run centres carries heightened poignance. “I mean, here we are. This is an arts district, or was an arts district. That was a product of these people’s vision and labour.”

Mercer often finds a more distinct experience in his interior life. Ridged and pockmarked by his unique memories, it’s a revelatory and creative space in which he thrives. “We can sometimes archive things from our own lives,” he says. “What is important from your daily rituals and habits? What are the things that emerge as central facets of your being, and what are just the things that you’re just forced to do?”

“If you had a deathbed fever, there would be certain images that cycled through your mind,” Mercer continues. “That’s my bread and butter for songwriting: what are those images? Before my deathbed fever, could I tweeze them out and put them in a song? Yes, I can!”

For Frog Eyes’ latest album, Mercer, alongside drummer Melanie Campbell, keyboardist Shyla Seller, and bassist Ryan Beattie, have shaped another batch of images into 10 new songs.

On wistful album standout “Chin Up,” a kaleidoscope of specific memories of growing up in Victoria, Mercer attempts to trace his teenaged self to the person he has become. “I used to catch the bus home to the rough suburb that we lived in called Langford,” he says. “The bus would go past my mom’s work, which was at the newspaper. I would always look up, and I would see the setting sun reflecting off of the lights of the Times Colonist.”

As much as Frog Eyes revisit the past and channel classic musical influences like Television, the Gun Club, and the Go-Betweens on The Open Up, they also convey a sense of time and place within the present.

“When I was listening to the test pressing, I really had the feeling of, ‘I’m in a club now.’ I feel like I could be in Green Auto or China Cloud. If I close my eyes, I have a visual sense of how big the club is, where I am in it. I’ve never made a record like that,” Mercer beams, effusive about his bandmates and the album’s producer, John Raham. “I guess that speaks to [the fact] that it was recorded live off the floor or in a studio that was not massive. You definitely have a sense of the sound bouncing off the walls.”

The Open Up is a living document, a personal form of resistance against the technological forces that dull how we interface with the world. “I have a hard time making universal statements,” Mercer says of his introspective line of inquiry. By acknowledging that our individual experiences differ vastly, he notes that “You can still be really respectful of other people and how they get through. Maybe in a way, you end up more respectful because you’re never disappointed when people aren’t exactly ideologically or philosophically aligned with where you think they should be.”

Mercer doesn’t know if it’s a problem with his music, “But there’s never that U2 moment where the crowd beats as one!” he emphasizes in mock triumph. “I’m not trying to bring us there. And whenever I feel someone trying to manipulate me into feeling like that, I always feel uncomfortable. I really actually like to see people go out and operate within their own silos.”