Modest Mouse were still in their early twenties when they recorded their 1997 breakthrough, just three kids from the Seattle suburbs. “Old enough to have gone to war and come back if we'd been born in a different time,” the indie rock outfit’s longtime leader, Isaac Brock, tells Apple Music two decades later. “Just getting our foot in the door of the world.” Only a year earlier, they’d released their debut, This Is a Long Drive for Someone With Nothing to Think About, an album whose title and restless spirit would act as an obvious precursor to The Lonesome Crowded West. “I’d started taking a lot of road trips,” he says. “Anytime anyone offered me acid or mushrooms at that point in my life, I’d go there. It was lots of driving around.” Brock—who, growing up, had bounced around between Oregon, Montana, and Washington State—was pained by what he saw through the windshield: the erasure of natural grandeur for another faceless suburb, another corporate chain, another disposable purchase or mindless good time. “I was having my opinions and shit, but by no means was I trying to reprimand civilization on any level,” he says. “These songs, they’re just an accounting of what it was like to look out the windows of my eyes.” On the thunderous (and prescient) seven-minute opener, “Teeth Like God’s Shoeshine,” he takes aim at malls during their mid-’90s heyday, his vocals caught in a storm of his own making, the guitars both scything and soothing in fits and spasms. On “Convenient Parking,” it’s the concrete ooze of urban sprawl, drummer Jeremiah Green and bassist Eric Judy finding grooves that mimic the phlegmatic rhythms of a struggling engine, of rubber on road. The band spent 17 days in Olympia, Washington, recording with Beat Happening’s Calvin Johnson. The sessions, Brock says, weren’t labored. “We didn’t sit there and stare at a screen for fucking days, that’s for damn sure—because there wasn’t one.” Looking back, it’s music that feels a world away from the fidgety optimism of 2004’s “Float On” or the hard-won peace of 2007’s “Fire It Up”—two highlights from the band’s more recent pop-oriented run. But when asked if he recognizes himself in the young man who wrote The Lonesome Crowded West, Brock doesn’t hesitate. “I absolutely do,” he says. “I’m not entirely him but know him well. And I miss him. Shit gets killed off and shit grows anew. I imagine and I hope that by the time I’m getting put in my grave, I’ll have shed some more stuff that isn’t particularly good and hopefully not grown any new stuff that isn’t particularly good.” Here, Brock takes us inside a few of the album’s songs. “Teeth Like God’s Shoeshine” “This song kind of demanded to be the opener. I love it. I have strong feelings about malls. I think there’s still a few Orange Juliuses, and I think the only place you can still find them is a mall. It’s like Cinnabons—there’s no fucking freestanding Cinnabon, like a brick-and-mortar Cinnabon. There’s airports and the fucking mall, and now truck stops, which is great bad news for touring.” “Heart Cooks Brain” “It’s actually ‘Polar Opposites’—we were supposed to be recording ‘Polar Opposites.’ Eric and Jeremiah started playing a part that was already written, and I started playing a different part. I went and walked on the train tracks for about an hour and came back with all the lyrics for that, which were spawned from a trip to Vancouver BC, which was beautiful. I remember being in some girl’s rental room as a band played there and going out at dawn and hanging on a roof and watching seagulls and ravens fight.” “Doin’ the Cockroach” “I just thought it was funny because there’s all these dance moves, like [singing], ‘Do the Bagel. Do the funky Bagel.’ I can actually say, from the bottom of my heart, that I’m glad that no one ever made up a dance to this. If they did, I wasn’t aware of it. I can’t imagine it would be a good move.” “Cowboy Dan” “Cowboy Dan’s a man I met once or twice. I walked down to a dam with him and my dad. Well, that was my uncle—he was playing the role of my dad at that time. I never met my dad, but he was also named Dan. Anyway, we walked down to this weird canyon dam in Helena, Montana, and there’s just a ton of pelicans sleeping in. It was so pretty, a nice day. Cowboy Dan was a fine dude, but he had nothing to do with the song—I just liked the name and, having grown up around reservations in Montana, it’s kind of a collection of perspectives from the time. Which is to say, it’s not about me. I didn’t go to the reservations and drink and shit, and I don’t know if that’s what Cowboy Dan did either.” “Long Distance Drunk” “Just a song about my grandma calling drunk all the time—shit like that.” “Polar Opposites” “It’s not, by far, my favorite song. I think maybe it came to me too easy, and so I’ve always been kind of self-conscious about this song. I felt that it was liked so much, but it took so much less effort, and I guess something about that rubbed me wrong. So, I have treated that song poorly—many years of not playing it and shit.” “Bankrupt on Selling” “If you know how to play that main guitar part, then you know one more song than I do. [Guitarist] Dann Gallucci played that guitar part in the tour van. We had time to kill in Green Bay—you open the side of the van and wait until you can load in or whatever the fuck you’re going to do. And I just sang along and played longer notes, pretty much on the spot. A good deal of the lyrics on our records kind of work that way, where it comes to me, and it just needs a little ironing out. Most of the time, I don’t have to sit down and put pen to paper. I know the lyrics before I ever have to write it down.” “Styrofoam Boots/It’s All on Ice, Alright” “First part of that song was an acoustic thing, and I played it to the band. Jeremiah and Eric were sitting there, waiting to come in and maybe do something. I don’t think they knew exactly what they were going to do but just kind of joined in on it at some point. And they started playing, and it was really good, but I had nothing to fucking do. So, I remember leaving the room while they played this part for, like, 20 minutes or so. It ended up being that long outro.”