Coyotes

By 2007, Modest Mouse had a gold album and a Top 40 hit — "Float On" had changed their commercial situation entirely, and We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank added Johnny Marr of The Smiths on guitar, a collaboration suggesting Brock was operating in a different register than the early Up Records records.

Coyotes is among the album's most expansive tracks: longer, more patient than early Modest Mouse, the arrangement allowing space for Marr's guitar textures to develop alongside the band's characteristic restlessness.

The later Modest Mouse catalog represents a genuinely different band than the early one — not a worse one, but a more comfortable one.