Nick Stevens’ eclectic folk-pop project The Eighty Six Seas may be based in Brooklyn, but its Boston aura permeates its identity and music. It starts right at the top, as not only is the project’s moniker is a wonderful play on the 1986 Boston Celtics, but its new album, February’s forthcoming Scenes from an Art Heist, is inspired by the still-unsolved 1990 theft of 13 pieces of art from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum.
On Thursday (November 2), Stevens returns to the area where he spent his college days as an aspiring folk singer to show off The Eighty Six Seas with a show at The Middle East in Cambridge. And he arrives with a dramatic new single called “Lonely Afternoon,” hitting the streams today (November 1), an electronic-pop jaunt of detached cool and seductive melodicism that’s loosely based on the first 30 minutes of late-’90s art heist film The Thomas Crown Affair.
For The Eighty Six Seas, it reflects just another day at the art-pop museum, whether it’s the film’s fictional setting at The Metropolitan Museum of Art or the real-life events that took place at the Gardner more than three decades ago.
“The first time I saw the room where most of the artwork was stolen, I had a visceral reaction to the absence of the pieces,” Stevens says. “It was eerie and spooky. I remember thinking: ‘Pour one out for the frames. Imagine waking up one morning, thrown carelessly on the floor, with something beautiful torn out of you. Now you have to act normal, and hang on the wall, but you know that you’ve had something beautiful torn out of you and everyone can see it. You know there are others out there like you, but you can’t see them.”
Scenes from an Art Heist is billed as an album that mimics the experience of walking through a gallery, drawing from each piece of art as it slowly develops a larger, overarching narrative. It sounds like The Eighty Six Seas have leaned into something fascinating, with historical intrigue and mystery are set to a captivating sound, and the first taste arrives with the magnetic pull of “Lonely Afternoon.” Maybe we’ll catch Stevens at the Gardner before his Cambridge gig later that night.
THE EIGHTY SIX SEAS + STRAIGHT PEPPER DIET + EVELYNROZE & THE THORNS + PADDED WALTZ :: Thursday, November 2 at The Middle East, 472 Massachusetts Ave. in Cambrige, MA :: 7 p.m., 18-plus, $12 :: Event info :: Advance tickets
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