Having created one of the finest albums of the past decade with 1998’s Deserter’s Songs, Mercury Rev prepare to release Snowflake Midnight, their eighth LP (and fifth with Jonathan Donahue as their lead singer) on September 29th. I spoke to keyboardist/ drummer Jeff Mercel at the annual Hydro Connect Festival in Inveraray, where the band played a storming headline set.

Dazed Digital: What can we expect from Snowflake Midnight?
Jeff Mercel: Well it is a new direction for us, in many ways. Every artist likes to say that their latest record is totally different from their last but we did take great pains to change the process whereby we record and we experimented with a lot of new instruments. We hoped that it would yield a greater result and a fresh sound for us.

DD: Do you ever feel that there is an expectation to deliver something as critically and commercially successful as Deserter’s Songs with each new release?
JM: We try not to think of that as something weighing around our necks! Deserter’s Songs was an album that opened a lot of doors for us and it is the reason that we are where we are today. We still play a lot of those songs live and people always ask us if that becomes tiresome but it doesn’t. So, yeah, it created a lot of opportunities for us, although a lot of people thought that we would follow it up with another album that sounded the same and that was never going to happen. We like to keep changing and moving forward.

DD: Indeed, whereas 2001’s All Is Dream received a strong reception, its follow-up, 2006’s The Secret Migration, didn’t go down quite so well. Why do you think this was?
JM: So much of it is timing. Oftentimes it has nothing to do with the music itself. Every record that we have done we have felt confident in and each one represented our best efforts at the time. We held nothing back with The Secret Migration and there was nothing forced in making that record but you have no way of knowing what reaction it will get when it goes out into the world. In some ways we expected, after the success of Deserter’s Songs, that All Is Dream would be cut off at the knees because sometimes the press likes to build you up only to see you knocked back down. So we were bracing ourselves but the backlash came a bit later in our case! Hopefully it doesn’t diminish The Secret Migration in the eyes of our fans and maybe it will come to be appreciated at a later date. It is so hard to say.

DD: In 2006 you also released a best of album. Why did you feel the time was right for that?
JM: It seemed to us that it was just a good point to stop and reflect. We had already begun work on Snowflake Midnight and it enabled us to draw a line and start anew, which was necessary for us with the new album.

DD: Finally, ever become tired of the debate about which band is better – The Flaming Lips or Mercury Revs?
JM: Yeah, that whole thing doesn’t mean much to me! If there is one thing that we have in common, other than the obvious link with Jonathan who played on a couple of their records, it is the spirit with which we go about making music. So I don’t have any problems with that comparison, although I don’t think our music sounds similar to be honest.