By Tate van der Poel
Eggs on Mars have revealed in past interviews that their moniker was adopted from a friend’s list of fake band names. This year marks a decade since the Kansas City, Missouri, band’s formation. However, these Eggs are neither rubber (as those with an incomplete, calcium-deficient shell) nor rotten (as those left in a shared kitchen by a scruple-deficient dorm resident).
I was doing my duties as co-director of WOBC’s Traffic workgroup in our weekly meeting, screening music submitted to the station by artists and labels, when I found an email from frontegg Brad Smith promoting their latest album, Warm Breakfast. The focus tracks were unanimously Traffic-approved. I sent one along for airplay on Staff Picks and managed to get Smith to agree to a Saturday morning Zoom interview.
Eggs on Mars’ sound, animated by Smith as the group’s songwriter, has undoubtedly evolved since their first project was released on Bandcamp in 2014. However, consistent throughout their eight projects is a relaxed, bittersweet nostalgia; a sickness for a home never left, simulated by bright, candid guitar work and succinctly earnest lyrics.
“I guess I always have tried to make 60’s pop music, but I can't really ever escape those 90’s roots, like Built to Spill and Guided by Voices and stuff like that,” Smith said. “Doug Martsch, the lead singer of Built to Spill, said that — and this is true of me too — the lyrics, they’re like the last thing I write. They go over the melody. Melody is key and, like, the most important thing. And then he always says the lyrics should be good enough to not be able to say, ‘oh, that lyric was dumb,’ but they don’t have to be so profound… I think with my lyrics, I'm oftentimes just trying to go for a certain feel in the song… the words are kind of just more poetic lines to express that emotion.”
One feels how Warm Breakfast “yolks” together multi-generational influences almost immediately: the 52-second opening track “Especially Now” invokes the Midwest of the 2010s with its intro guitar and drums and is also the first track to employ Beach Boys-reminiscent vocal harmonies thematic to the album (and particularly notable in “Never Change” and “My Words”).
Smith partially attributes this quality to being a product of the Midwest: “I think the Midwest does have a kind of—it might have a certain genre-ific sound, like we're not quite as hip as the coasts, like trends are slower to get to us… I mean, we would just find stuff slower. Like, I remember first getting Built to Spill CDs from the library and stuff.” (Now Smith, in his day job, teaches technology programs at a library and says “Hell yeah” to supporting our public libraries.)
When we spoke, the group had just played a show the night before at a venue generally characteristic of their Kansas City scene. “It was kind of a last-minute thing. We didn't think we're gonna play anymore this year. But our friend just opened a record store in the basement of this co-op… so they sell plants and jewelry and shirts upstairs, and we played in the basement, so it was pretty cool. It was pretty chill… we play all kinds of odd spaces.”
The laid-back atmosphere delivered by Warm Breakfast seems to reflect an attitude the band takes to their entire musical enterprise, from creation to performance to strategy. “We're not like a super duper busy group. I mean, we do everything pretty at our own pace, and pretty chill,” Smith said.
This is not to say the Eggs are disorganized or listless, however. Lesser groups might have disintegrated from the stress of ten years and, at one point, losing a founding member in a move to Japan. But Eggs on Mars, resilient as astronautical poultry products must be, have only gotten stronger.“When we started out, we weren't very good… [it’s] just been kind of a gradual learning as we go and getting better and better. So I feel like the eggs have just gotten, you know, even more delicious over time, basically. So, yeah, no staleness here.”
Warm Breakfast perfectly exemplifies this non-staleness. As Smith put it, if this album were an egg, it would be a poached egg, “the classiest of all egg preparations… the thought and the preparation behind it is what I would say gives it that classy poached egg feel to it, whereas some [earlier records] are just kind of like—here's a hard-boiled egg. You know, here's a quick scramble. This is more thoughtful and thought out.”
So what’s next for Eggs on Mars? “We're already back to the drawing board to come up with a sequel to Warm Breakfast. ‘Warmer Breakfast 2.’” Smith joked. The plan is to work on the new album in 2024, potentially for an early 2025 release. And after that, who knows? “We're in a pretty good, comfortable spot just to kind of keep this going. So I don't see any reason why it should—or how it should—stop.”