Nap Eyes have pronounced their love for Green Day once again, and put their money with their mouth is with a cover of “When I Come Around.” For frontman Nigel Chapman, it’s a dream come true with video directed by Margarita Brighton in which Nigel transforms himself into a pop-punk caricature… but it’s conducted with such a perfect fluency in the culture that it’s hard to spot the joke. This goes beyond homage and well into the territory of competing on the level with the original.
I know it’s hard to believe but, just maybe, we once took Green Day for granted. In the 1990s, the trio of Billie Joe Armstrong, Mike Dirnt, and Tré Cool seemed like they were everywhere, or, at least, everywhere that counted. For many of us that meant a near-constant presence of the Much Countdown.
As significant as that alone may have been, hindsight has granted us a better indicator of the true merits of their unholy triumvirate— Dookie, Insomniac, and Nimrod, three of their finest albums—and how they might compare in a greater context on the following three decades. Rather than a punk rock band floating in the midst of so many more punk rock bands, albeit the one that did give the song that most of us awkwardly learned to slow dance to, we were experiencing a brush with longevity and certainly some better songwriting than perhaps we were capable of recognizing.
Graham Chapman brings that to the forefront in Nap Eyes’ new video. In his own habitual deadpan style, the Green Day’s lyrics get brought front and center and highlighted. No longer is this the joyous cacophony of our youth, but a wisened poetry. The video might be full of tropes, but it’s so expertly done that we might have just turned the clock back by twenty-five years.
“Green Day has been my favourite band since I was 12 years old, and ‘When I Come Around’ has always been one of my favourites by them,” says Chapman. “The quality of the song speaks for itself; it’s one of the greatest songs ever written, in my opinion. I’ve been working under the influence and in the shadows of this and other Green Day songs, periodically reconnecting with and being floored by them, ever since I first began writing my own songs years ago. I hope the world will understand that getting to record this cover with Nap Eyes is a longtime dream come true.”
The song also provides the title track to Nap Eyes’s upcoming four-track EP, which already hints at another similar gem. The track-listing notes a cover of Bonnie Raitt’s “Thank You,” along with a single unreleased track titled “Following A God Desire,” plus a re-working of their song “Even Though I Can’t Read Your Mind” by hyper-pop duo Time XL (Nap Eyes guitarist Brad Loughead and drummer Seamus Dalton) – titled “Read Yr Mind (Time XL Remix).”
When I Come Around, will be released on the 14th May via Royal Mountain Records and Jagjaguwar