"What's up, floaters?!"
The Norwegian Pearl is pulling away from Miami Cruise Terminal B, and hundreds of people are gathered on the pool deck, waiting for the show to begin. The friendly thirtysomething woman who just greeted us is met with raucous cheers when she introduces herself as "Sixthman Betty," an employee of the specialty events company Sixthman who has been promptly replying to questions from people in this cruise's official Facebook group for months. She's become a small-scale celebrity on a ship brimming with small-scale celebrities.
It's February 2026, and the Pearl is hosting the inaugural Ice Cream Floats, a four-day music festival at sea curated and headlined by indie rock veterans Modest Mouse. We'll spend the next two days sailing to Puerto Plata, then two more returning to Miami, with lots of performances along the way by the headliners and their hand-picked undercard of indie bands. For Sixthman, which puts together dozens of these themed concert cruises per year, this is business as usual. For Modest Mouse and their fans, these are uncharted waters, figuratively speaking.
Betty informs us that the band will emerge soon. In the meantime, servers will deliver a free shot of something smooth and sweet for anyone in the crowd who wants one. We're instructed to keep our plastic thimbles full until we get the signal to go bottoms up. While we wait to be entertained, a selection from Destroyer's Kaputt plays over the loudspeaker, a potent mixture of indie rock and yacht rock blaring in the sea breeze.
The temperature is hovering in the low 60s Fahrenheit — unexpectedly chilly by Miami standards, though given the sub-freezing temperatures and paralyzing snowstorms that have been bombarding me in Ohio for weeks, I'm just happy to be comfortable in a hoodie. Still, the dark hue of the clouds does not bode well for what is supposed to be a full-length Modest Mouse set to inaugurate our voyage. The start time for this performance has already been bumped up from 5 p.m. to 3:30 p.m. to account for inclement weather. When the band finally appears, frontman Isaac Brock gives it to us straight.
"Alright, I'm gonna be the bearer of neutral news," Brock says, looking cozy and informal in a white TKG hoodie of his own. He explains that, because of a storm in the forecast, Modest Mouse will be playing an abbreviated acoustic set this afternoon and looking for another time this weekend to slot in today's planned performance. Though the band poses for a photo in front of the crowd before getting started, Brock neglects to give us the cue to down our shots. Instead, he reflects on the novelty of this experience.
"I've never been on a boat like this before," he tells us. "I've seen them from afar. They're fucking crazy." Brock says the ship's grandeur has stirred a feeling of inadequacy within him, a sense that, "Oh fuck, I should be better at things than I am."
On one hand, I get it. A boat like this is majestic, mysterious, overwhelming. On the other hand, Brock should cut himself some slack. Maybe he doesn't know how to construct a Jewel-class vessel accommodating roughly 2,400 passengers, but the old Modest Mouse album title Building Nothing Out Of Something also does not apply. He came from nothing, and he's clearly built something. All these people gathered on the pool deck are proof of that.
***
"We're not cruise people," Greg Malzberg says, "but we're Modest Mouse people."
Malzberg, 35, is explaining how he and his wife Jamie, 37, ended up on a 965-foot vessel en route to the Dominican Republic despite a prior disinterest in cruising that bordered on disdain. Like many people I talk to on the boat, Brock included, this is their first time vacationing on the high seas. But when they learned about a floating music festival headlined by Modest Mouse, it sounded like too much fun to pass up.
In some ways, Ice Cream Floats is a standard Norwegian cruise. Pearl passengers can enjoy a luxury spa, a smoke-filled casino, hot tubs, karaoke, and a range of casual and formal dining options. When we get to Puerto Plata, we can pay a taxi way too much money to drive us to the beach, or we can stay in the waterfront mini-mall situation by the pier. There are cruise ship performers, too; they just happen to be Modest Mouse and their personally selected peers, performing for crowds wearing more band tees than you'll find at your average maritime getaway.
When all is said and done, Modest Mouse will step to the pool deck stage three times on the Pearl: Thursday's acoustic appetizer, a crowdsourced set of fan favorites Friday, and a full-album performance of their 2000 masterpiece The Moon And Antarctica Sunday afternoon. On Saturday, Brock's side project Ugly Casanova will perform for the first time in 24 years. Band members will also pop up for DJ sets and various interactive events that provide more intimate access than your average rock show.
Every other performer on the ship is doing two or three sets, too — mostly veteran Modest Mouse associates like Built To Spill and Califone, but also some younger bands like Mannequin Pussy and Tropical Fuck Storm. David Cross from Mr. Show and Arrested Development, whose career has been interwoven with indie rock since Yo La Tengo's "Sugarcube" video if not before, will do standup comedy twice in the Stardust Theater, one of several venues nestled deep inside the boat.
More than just the entertainment is bespoke. Fans can attend autograph sessions, shop at a well-stocked merch depot, and add ink to their bodies at an onboard tattoo parlor. The ship's standard cocktails have been renamed in Modest Mouse's honor — "Novocain Stain" for the margarita, "Cowboy Dan" for the old fashioned, and so on. Specialized keepsakes are delivered to each stateroom throughout the weekend, including a commemorative poster and a postcard that doubles as a record with Brock covering "I Don't Want To Live On The Moon" from Sesame Street. Music from Ice Cream Floats performers is piped into the ship's many rooms and corridors; the first song I hear upon boarding is "Fly Around My Pretty Little Miss."
The Malzbergs are here in part because Modest Mouse played a crucial role in their meet-cute, which also featured the band's songs functioning as muzak. Years ago, when Greg was a resident in a psychiatric emergency room, he had control of the tunes that pumped into the facility. He put on a track from Modest Mouse's 1996 debut album This Is A Long Drive For Someone With Nothing To Think About and was delighted to learn that Jamie, a nurse practitioner who had caught his eye, was familiar with it. As they moved from courtship to marriage, attending concerts by bands like LCD Soundsystem became a big part of their relationship. They identify as indie rock fans.
They are also DINKs based in Brooklyn's Clinton Hill neighborhood, seeking a reprieve from one of the most brutal winters in memory. The Malzbergs were going to vacation somewhere, they figured, so it might as well be on a boat in the Caribbean with a bunch of their favorite bands. Thus, here they are consuming Reubens in a fake Irish pub called O'Sheehan's, explaining that while their younger selves might have flinched at this arrangement, at this stage of life, they get it.
"As I've gotten older, I don't view it as selling out anymore," Greg says. "If I was 18, I would have been like, 'God, a cruise? Are you kidding me?' And nowadays it's like, no, it makes sense. He's probably got to support his family."
The "he" in question is Brock, the Portland-based musician who has been fronting Modest Mouse since he was a teenager. He's 50 now, the only remaining original member of the band, which he has built from a DIY success story into an indie rock institution.
If you want to split hairs about the word "indie," Modest Mouse are just now getting back to being technically independent. During the five-album stretch from The Moon And Antarctica through 2021's The Golden Casket, they were signed to the major label Epic Records. New single "Look How Far…," released a few weeks after the cruise, is their first release through Brock's own Glacial Pace imprint. Regardless of their business affiliations, "indie rock" is the first phrase anyone would use to describe them. It's the world they came up in, one they've helped to shape, even as their quirks and aberrations transcended it.
Brock has always traveled his own path. Writing about poverty, binge drinking, and endless highway drives, he brought an uncouth sensibility to a brainy, sensitive scene without sacrificing the deep thoughts or big feelings. In a genre so collegiate that people used to call it "college rock," he was the guy singing, "Goddamn, I hope I can pass high school," channeling rough-and-tumble hipster totems like Pixies and Tom Waits. Years ago, when his bandmates moved to Seattle, Brock holed up in the "redneck logging town" of Cottage Grove, Oregon because it reminded him of where he grew up. This is the dude who once stabbed himself with a pocketknife onstage (he later said he got carried away in the moment) and who used to brag about running over dogs for sport (he was clearly trolling). A 2009 MTV News feature summed up his reputation: "He was a maniac, a monster, a misanthrope ... the surliest loner in all of indie rock, and rather proudly so."
Beyond the ways he naturally bucked expectations, Brock took pains to set Modest Mouse apart. In the '90s, he made a conscious effort to identify his band with their hometown of Issaquah, Washington so that they wouldn't be lumped in with the hype around grunge-era Seattle or the indie-pop mecca of Olympia. But they moved through those scenes: releasing music via labels including Olympia's K Records and Seattle's Up Records, taking influence from regional heroes like Lync and Built To Spill, touring and collaborating with scrappy everyman rockers 764-HERO. They recorded many of their early classics with DIY paragon Calvin Johnson.
Though they've long since breached the surface and bloomed into a wildly successful radio-friendly rock band, this group's roots are in an underground counterculture that theoretically stood in opposition to the kind of gaudy excess embodied by the cruise industry. As an ideal, indie rock is supposed to represent underdogs and outsiders, community and collective action, integrity and anti-commercialism. Barring all that, it's at least supposed to be cool in a way that clashes with the cruise industry's reputation as a bougie, lowest-common-denominator way to holiday, derided by David Foster Wallace as "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again." Speaking of Calvin Johnson's former associates, it's hard to imagine the virulently cred-conscious Kurt Cobain agreeing to a Nirvana cruise — not without applying several more layers of self-hatred along with his sunscreen.
This line of thinking is why Kurt Vile was apprehensive about taking the gig at first. When I catch up with the stoner folk-rock icon on the last day of the cruise, he says he's had a wonderful time aboard the Pearl. He keeps running into Cross late at night and laughing his ass off. He's been mesmerized by the loop of music videos from Ice Cream Floats artists that plays on the stateroom TVs. All three Built To Spill sets have blown him away. Still, in years past, he and his wife have often disparaged cruises as wasteful and corny. So when presented with the opportunity to perform on Ice Cream Floats, he worried she might nix the trip — and that she might be right to.
"I'm not putting anybody down who goes on cruises," Vile says, explaining his thought process before agreeing to participate. "But in another way, it's the definition of American gluttony."
It's not just that an indie rock cruise seems like a contradiction in terms. A Modest Mouse cruise is an especially ludicrous proposition. This is a moody, cantankerous, thematically dense group whose great subjects include the vast expanse of the American West (dotted with deranged, defeated characters and paved over by decaying strip malls) and the infinite cosmic expanse above (populated by a cruel or absent creator and stars that are actually projectors, projectin' our lives down to this planet Earth). They also have a disconcerting number of releases about boat disasters, from 1997's "Shit Luck" to 2007's We Were Dead Before The Ship Even Sank. They're about as far from "Cheeseburger In Paradise" as you can get.
Yet these are also the "Float On" guys. When it debuted in 2004, "Float On" was the previously unthinkable: a happy Modest Mouse song. Yes, it appeared on an album called Good News For People Who Like Bad News, amidst umpteen tracks about death, burial, and the great beyond. But the band's breakthrough hit — performed on The O.C., covered on American Idol, nominated for Best Rock Song at the Grammys, and peaking at #68 the Billboard Hot 100 — revealed a previously unseen capacity for cautious optimism, executed with a chipper accessibility only hinted at on past records. Lots of bad things happen in "Float On" — lost jobs, flippant words, a fender-bender with a cop — but Brock faces them with grace and hopefulness rather than his usual cynicism. "Sometimes life's OK," he earnestly lisps, the band's signature rhythmic oomph and spacey-wiry guitars transmuted into a blissed-out singalong.
"Float On" established Modest Mouse a foothold at alt-rock radio and reframed Brock, the feral visionary, as a crank with a heart of gold. The band had allowed a few rays of sunshine into their music, and they immediately reaped the rewards. Since then, it hasn't always been smooth sailing, but Modest Mouse have eased out of their early volatility and into middle-aged consistency. The breathless evolution that marked their first decade has given way to lengthy gaps between albums that, despite some cosmetic differences, do not significantly alter the Modest Mouse template. The group regularly heads out on package tours with peers like Weezer, Pixies, and the Flaming Lips, widely beloved bands-become-brands whose best work is also behind them. Like most artists whose careers last this long, Modest Mouse are in their long-tail, legacy-management phase.
This means a good chunk of their fan base has lived long enough to earn some spending money. It also means the band has built a broad enough coalition that many of their listeners never had any connection to the underground and its traditional ideals. Even if they did, Modest Mouse's rise to fame coincided with widespread changes in indie rock and its surrounding culture, including the near-extinction of "selling out" as a relevant concept and the widespread reevaluation of all kinds of music once laughed off as hokey. We did the chillwave thing nearly 20 years ago at this point. The most surprising thing about an indie rock cruise is that there aren't more of them.
***
Isaac Brock did not sign up for this shit.
OK, he literally did sign up for it, but he didn't realize what he was getting himself into.
When I meet with Modest Mouse's founder Friday afternoon, in a penthouse suite on an exclusive VIP deck known as the Haven, he has just finished getting his photo taken with 400 cabins' worth of Modest Mouse fans, one cabin at a time. Later today, he's supposed to host a Mystery Science Theater 3000-style roast of The Devil's Advocate (1997) even though "I'm not so much a heckler as I am a shusher."
There are many other appearances scheduled for the weekend, including an AMA on the pool deck that will dredge him out of bed before the crack of noon. Brock is aiming to see every band at least once, as well as Caseymagic, the punk-rock magician he hired to perform on the Pearl. He doesn't feel ready for the Ugly Casanova reunion performance, and he promised someone on the Modest Mouse fan club message board that he'd perform a certain song that he definitely forgot to relearn. He has too much to do on this vacation. And for now, when he probably should be rehearsing or recuperating, he's explaining to me why he said yes when Sixthman came calling.
"It does seem pretty off fucking brand," Brock says of the cruise while sipping iced coffee. "I'm enjoying myself, but I still haven't come to terms with it."
Brock had a different cruise in mind at first: "When we initially talked, I said I wanted to do it from Seattle to Alaska because that's my speed, you know? Cold and gray." Eventually, he learned that you can't perform music outside on an Alaskan cruise because so much of the coastline is a nature preserve, and the noise would disturb the animals. "I'm all for that," he concedes, "and not pissing off wolves with your dumb rock music."
The splendor of the wilderness has always been important to Brock. Modest Mouse's 1997 opus The Lonesome Crowded West is about the folly of developing charming Cascadian towns and vistas into a bleary, soulless sprawl. Though he sang on that album's tender ballad "Trailer Trash" about time he spent living in a trailer park growing up, nowadays he and his family live on 30 acres of forest land in Portland — his own little nature preserve within the city limits. At the AMA later this weekend, he'll tell the crowd that if he wasn't making music for a living, he'd be a biologist or park ranger. So before signing on with Sixthman, he had to be convinced that Ice Cream Floats would not have a devastating environmental impact.
"I think they said it somehow had a lower carbon footprint than your average show you put on," he says. "And so I've chosen to believe that, but I'm not sure I do. I mean, I believe there's a smokestack on this thing."
Even after Brock consented to headline his own cruise, his hangups about the experience didn't let up until he got on board. "I've never been on a cruise ship before because I've never wanted to be on a cruise ship before, because it seemed kind of like being trapped at a casino. And I also don't really care for Vegas," he says. "But last night I was like, 'I think I could actually live on a boat.' I think that might be what I need to do. I was so much less concerned about all the important scary shit that's going on in the world. I was like, 'Oh, I'm on a boat. It's out of my fucking hands.' And so that feels nice for a few days. Escapism is awesome, and this is that."
The vibe is indeed nice — a lot nicer than doomscrolling through social media posts about about ICE raids and the Epstein files. The food in the all-day buffet is nothing special, but it sure is available. The weather doesn't cooperate completely — during a pool deck performance so windy I can't believe they don't pull the plug, Vile has to hide his flowing mane under an MF Doom baseball cap — but there's still ample opportunity to sunbathe with a book and a cocktail. As for the Modest Mouse-specific elements of the experience, Brock says some of his more perverse ideas, such as plank-walking, did not come to pass. Instead, there's bingo hosted by David Cross and crafting sessions for a nightly parade in which passengers are encouraged to let their freak flags fly.
The music is consistently excellent, too. Based on prior encounters with their live show, I already knew I'd be amazed by Mannequin Pussy's stadium-ready ferocity, and I once again am. After decades of Califone fandom with no concert to show for it, the group's deconstructed roots rock is everything I hoped it would be; their performance in a lounge during sunset opens up portals to other dimensions. Other bands sneak up on me. I've never had the privilege of being mesmerized by a singing saw before catching Black Heart Procession, and Portugal. The Man's winsome onstage party rocks harder than I expected.
Modest Mouse themselves are in fighting form, professional yet combustible, trotting out gem after gem and reminding me why they became one of my indie rock gateway drugs a quarter-century ago. Though Brock's co-founders Eric Judy and the late Jeremiah Green are sorely missed, his current ensemble brings his songs to life in a way that feels more like a labor of love than a mercenary operation. And although I never spent much time with 2002's Sharpen Your Teeth, Ugly Casanova's performance — with Brock in a beekeeper suit, backed by members of Modest Mouse, Califone, and Black Heart Procession, plus producer Suzy Shinn — might have marked the weekend's awe-inspiring peak.
Mannequin Pussy are having a much better time than they did playing Coheed And Cambria's S.S. Neverender cruise three years ago on this very same ship. When she got the Coheed invite, frontwoman Marisa Dabice's initial reaction was, "Fuck no, I don't want to do a cruise." She elaborates, "That's never something I would want to do in my personal life. I have a deep fear of the open ocean. [Drummer] Kaleen [Reading] gets seasick. There's both existential and physical ailments that would follow us onto boats."
The prospect of trying something new and unique won out, but her time on the Coheed cruise ultimately bore out her concerns. There were many more bands on the lineup, which led to a much more chaotic experience. On top of the logistical mess, nasty weather made the Pearl literally rock hard. Dabice and her bandmates barely slept. Nausea prevailed. "It was kind of just hell on earth," she remembers. When it was over, they swore they'd never do another cruise.
But Modest Mouse extended the invite near the end of a lengthy promo cycle behind 2024's I Got Heaven, and Mannequin Pussy figured they could use the money to help keep them afloat while working on their next album. Plus, this time they get to host Austin Powers trivia, indulging their personal passion for the Mike Meyers secret agent spoof. (At the event, multiple teams choose the name Mannequin Pussy Galore, and Dabice hands out prizes from her own personal stash of Austin Powers memorabilia.)
I suggest to Dabice that headlining a cruise is an unexpected twist for Modest Mouse of all bands. She instantly disagrees, nodding to a reality in which bespoke experiences for hardcore supporters are becoming an essential component of the music industry. As she puts it, "I'm not really surprised at this point at what people will do to help facilitate a festival experience or an interesting and funny situation for the fans."
A Modest Mouse cruise is at least a little amusing for Tim Rutili. The Califone frontman is a living legend to anyone with the good sense to recognize him as such, but he's not really a rock star in terms of reputation or aura. Onstage with Ugly Casanova, Brock ribs Rutili for dressing like Larry David, and Rutili takes every opportunity to sit down while performing. These days, Califone mostly inhabit a DIY echelon of indie rock that involves playing dive bars and house shows and selling records directly to fans on Bandcamp.
Rutili has never set foot on a cruise ship before this weekend, and his plaintive, noisy music is arguably the least cruise-appropriate of all the artists here. "When they asked us to go and do Califone on the cruise, I was like, 'This is going to be really weird,'" he says, "and it was pretty weird." He enjoyed seeing the sky turn orange during Califone's sunset performance, but their set in the atrium beneath O'Sheehan's was more like playing in a mall where the floor moves.
When I run into Rutili near the smoking area Saturday afternoon, he's just wrapped up a chat with some Sixthman staffers in a lounge somewhere deep inside the ship. "I was asking about other cruises that they do," he says. "And they do, like, The Bachelor. They do a Hallmark Christmas cruise. They do Headbanger's Ball. There's all these theme cruises, and they're all ridiculous. It's like turbo marketing." Mentally situating Ice Cream Floats amongst those outings led to an epiphany for Rutili: "I guess this is a turbo market, and I didn't know that it was."
***
If you remember Sister Hazel, it's probably because of "All For You," a folky, jangly, poppy rock tune that reached #1 on Billboard's Adult Pop Airplay chart. "All For You" was all over VH1 in 1997, and it might be playing at your local grocery store right this second. I don't know if I've ever actively sought out that song, but its chorus is seared into my brain: "It's hard to say what it is I see in you/ Wonder if I'll always be with you."
Sister Hazel might be a one-hit wonder to you, but there are people whose relationship with the band runs much deeper. From their earliest days in Gainesville, they had a street team called the Hazelnuts, who helped power them to their mainstream breakthrough and stuck with them when it was over. In 2001, during an online chat with Sister Hazel's manager, Andy Levine, the Hazelnuts expressed a desire for a weekend with the band they'd been tirelessly promoting. The Sister Hazel guys were into the idea, so Levine pondered how to make it happen.
His eventual solution was to invite the band's core supporters on a cruise. On Labor Day weekend 2001, "Rock And Roll At Sea" set sail from Tampa en route to Key West and Cozumel. On the boat, Sister Hazel played a concert for 400 of their biggest fans, and Levine caught a vision for a company that would put on these kinds of up-close-and-personal events all the time. It was the dawn of Sixthman and of "The Rock Boat," as subsequent editions of the Sister Hazel cruise came to be known.
For a few years, the Rock Boat was Sixthman's only event. But as the flagship cruise grew — adding more bands to the lineup, expanding attendance to 2,000 and beyond — the company got some wind in its sails. In 2004, they launched a complementary event called the Rock Slope at a Colorado ski resort. In 2007, Sixthman produced cruises for Lynyrd Skynyrd and the Barenaked Ladies. They kept adding more floating festivals: a John Mayer cruise, a Kid Rock cruise, a Zac Brown cruise, a VH1 cruise, a 311 cruise, a Weezer cruise, a KISS Kruise.
In 2012, Norwegian Cruise Line bought Sixthman, and the events kept multiplying. Paramore came on board. So did Diplo's label Mad Decent. By the time Levine stepped down as CEO in 2016 to pursue other ventures, some non-musical theme cruises had entered into the mix, like the Impractical Jokers Cruise and Gronk's Party Boat starring future NFL Hall of Famer Rob Gronkowski. By 2019, they'd even headed to Europe to book a Mediterranean cruise for indie-pop mainstays Belle & Sebastian. The cruises went on hold by necessity due to COVID-19, but by late 2021 the ships were back up and running.
That's when Jeff Cuellar got involved. Cuellar already had a two-decade career with festival promoter AC/C3/Live Nation, helping to bring events like Bonnaroo and Forecastle to life. Coming off more than a year of COVID shutdowns, he was just getting back into the swing of it when former Sixthman CEO Anthony Diaz called to recruit him. Despite some anxiety about getting into the cruise ship business, an industry that was arguably hit even harder by the pandemic than live music, he says "the ability to hyper-serve communities" is what persuaded him to make the leap. "With 'Roo, a large contingent of our guests, our patrons, were coming back no matter what the lineup," Cuellar tells me in a phone call ahead of my Ice Cream Floats experience. "That element of place and community was something that always resonated with me."
Industry-leading Sixthman and other similar promoters like Cloud 9 Adventures and Entertainment Cruise Productions have learned how profitable hyper-specialization can be. Their trick is to harness a core audience of superfans for a particular niche — a band, a comedian, or even a sport or cuisine — and attract them with the promise of intimate access and likeminded community. "If there is a fanbase that is highly passionate about something," Cuellar explains, "there could be an opportunity to create something special." He believes these kinds of experiences are changing the stigma that cruising is "just for old people, just lounging out on the pool deck and not excitement."
Sixthman has 26 events scheduled for 2026, from Creed's Summer Of '99 And Beyond festival to Sublime's Reef Madness. There are cruises devoted to hip-hop, outlaw country, blues, heavy metal, EDM, punk rock, emo, roots rock, garage rock, and singer-songwriter fare. Aside from the music festivals, Sixthman has a pro wrestling cruise headlined by Chris Jericho, a Food Network cruise called Chefs Making Waves, even a Jay and Silent Bob cruise. And it doesn't stop with Sixthman. Other promoters' offerings include an '80s cruise, a Star Trek cruise, a jam band cruise, a crafting cruise, a true crime cruise, a gaming cruise centered on geek-culture singer-songwriter Jonathan Coulton, and the world's only maritime motorcycle rally.
Part of making these events special is customizing them as much as possible, which requires intensive, detail-oriented planning, but also a lot of setting up and tearing down on days when a ship like the Pearl is changing over from one theme to the next. The changeovers can involve minor tweaks, like customized felt on the casino tables and branding on the elevator doors, or huge transformations, like installing a skate ramp and halfpipe for Flogging Molly's Salty Dog Cruise. Cuellar says processes that would take days for traditional festivals have to get done in hours for cruise ship events. He compares it to setting up and tearing down the Super Bowl Halftime Show.
(Relatedly, Ice Cream Floats coincides with Super Bowl Sunday, and the handling of that broadcast here versus other Sixthman cruises is instructive. On the Nate Bargatze cruise that the company is also producing this weekend, they're showing the big game in the ship's biggest venue possible, the pool deck, which makes sense because the comedian is a sports nut. Brock and many of his fans are indifferent to the NFL, so on the Pearl, the Super Bowl is shown in the much smaller confines of O'Sheehan's. Built To Spill's Doug Martsch is there, chilled-out as always, pleased to watch his Seahawks win it all. A few tables over, during Bad Bunny's halftime show, David Cross turns to his friends and gleefully announces, "This is MAGA's worst nightmare!")
How do they decide which artists to approach about headlining their own cruise? It's "a mixture of science and art and just gut," Cuellar explains. "As a promoter, that's probably the hardest part. I think you ask any promoter and it's all gambling." He says it's less about finding acts that can headline arenas worldwide and more about finding ones with an extremely engaged fan base. There's a big difference between asking your fans to kill a couple hours with you in their hometown versus investing the time and money to spend several days trapped on a boat together. "Our business development team, they're looking at Pollstar numbers and Spotify listens, but we're digging in deeper, beyond even social," Cuellar says. "How active is their fan club? Do they have a subreddit? Do they have their own tequila? A podcast? Those elements come together to fully present that picture."
Modest Mouse do indeed have a fan club, a Patreon-like subscription community launched in 2023 called Ice Cream Party, which gives Ice Cream Floats its name. A rep for the band declined to share how many people subscribe, but it's enough to populate a bustling message board — and seemingly enough to pique Sixthman's interest. Before it was a fan club, "Ice Cream Party" was a standalone Modest Mouse single about "a super, super depressing birthday party" Brock attended as a child. Before that, Ice Cream Party was the name of his recording studio in Portland, a nondescript building with an ice cream cone-shaped sign mounted on the outside, where all of Modest Mouse's writing, recording, and rehearsals take place and Brock runs his record label. As for why he keeps using the Ice Cream Party name: "I don't know. Ice cream's fun."
Cuellar says Sixthman pursued a Modest Mouse cruise because "we didn't really have anything in that lane." He's right. I would have guessed the lack of indie rock on this company's docket is because the genre's audience believes itself to be above this kind of thing. But if the people aboard the Pearl for Ice Cream Floats have any apprehensions about cruise life, they have no such hangups about loudly, proudly loving Modest Mouse.
***
You should know about the couple who named their sons Isaac and Brock.
When Meagan Burkart met her husband Mike in 2001, Modest Mouse was already his favorite band. Soon, she'd be all-in too. Mike was a college freshman at the University of Cincinnati, Meagan a high school senior who ended up hanging out at his dorm through a mutual friend. They hit it off quickly, and the first time she stayed over at his place, his CD-changer alarm randomly woke them up to the sound of "Dramamine." The first song on Modest Mouse's first album had become a curtain-raising moment on their relationship. Four years later, it soundtracked their first dance at their wedding. "It's actually a pretty good waltz," Mike points out.
By the time the Burkarts got hitched, their first son had already arrived, and they'd agreed to name him Isaac in honor of the band that had been threaded into their story. When they got pregnant with a second child, they hoped it would be a boy so they could name him Brock — and so it transpired. A couple decades later, here they are breathing in the salty ocean air, telling me all about a connection with Modest Mouse that drew them here despite no previous interest in cruising.
"Because of Isaac Brock and Modest Mouse, we have a closer relationship with our two sons," Meagan says. "They both have a special bond together because of it as well, which is heartwarming to see because Isaac is autistic and struggles to make friends, but Brock is always there for him."
When Isaac and Brock were little, their parents often calmed them down by playing Good News For People Who Like Bad News and other Modest Mouse releases. The family attended many of the band's shows together, from Forecastle to the Brooklyn Bowl, and the boys learned all about their namesake from a young age. "As far back as I can really remember, like [age] four or five, it just kind of became the thing that I told everyone as soon as I met them," says Brock, 19. "It's something I'm pretty proud of."
Isaac, 22, stayed home in Indiana because he worried he wouldn't handle the cruise experience well, so Brock is holding it down for both brothers at Ice Cream Floats. He says he's here as a fan in his own right, not just to make his parents happy, and listing 2015's Strangers To Ourselves as the frontrunner for his favorite Modest Mouse album does suggest his interest is deeper than casual.
His parents' love for the group remains strong, too. Mike, 44, appreciates the "clairvoyant" quality of a three-decade-old lyric like "The malls are the soon to be ghost towns." Meagan, 42, is drawn to the frequent references to animals. She's working on getting her right arm filled up with tattoos of creatures mentioned in Modest Mouse and Ugly Casanova songs. All these years later, they have no regrets about naming their children after a wild card like Isaac Brock. They have nothing but gratitude for the guy.
That's a common sentiment on Ice Cream Floats. The Pearl is full of superfans for whom this vacation holds incredible personal significance. There are certainly people on board who are less engaged in the Modest Mouse of it all. On the elevator I meet some Sixthman regulars who like to try out different offerings from the company, who were on the Pearl for the Rock Boat in the days before Ice Cream Floats and opted to stick around. One guy in the cruise's official Facebook group lamented that he and his spouse booked the cruise as their honeymoon mainly to see the rowdy California rockers FIDLAR, who were originally on the lineup but had to bail. But this trip sold out, and most folks don't spend between $1,380 (interior cabin) and $3,045 (suite) to go on a Modest Mouse cruise unless Modest Mouse matters to them deeply.
Elsje Collins is one such person. Collins, 52, has been going to Modest Mouse shows since the '90s. She can't remember how many times she's seen the band. In recent years she's been getting around in a wheelchair due to hereditary spastic paraplegia, a non-terminal progressive disease in the same family as ALS, which has complicated her concert experiences. Collins lives just outside Modest Mouse's home base of Portland. The band's tour stops there tend to be at the historic amphitheater Edgefield, which, per Collins, has an awful ADA setup that prevents her from seeing the stage. So she rolled her power chair onto the Pearl in hopes of snagging a better view.
"Live music is one of the things that really brings me a lot of joy, and it's one of the things that I can still do," Collins says. "Because I used to go out hiking and go running and do all the things, and now I can't. And so seeing bands still gives me that feeling in my heart. It just feels really good."
Ash Fleshman is here for Built To Spill at least as much as Modest Mouse, but most of all she's here for herself. Fleshman, 40, is in the midst of a life reboot. For two decades, she was a porn actor and YouTuber. Her romantic partner died three years ago. She recently stepped away from "the content hamster wheel," got sober, and enrolled in film school in Philadelphia.
"A lot of the things I do are kind of separate from mainstream society, and I like to expose people to worlds that they might not know," Fleshman explains, citing a recent short film she made about zines as a way to express queer and antifascist views.
After living as a trans woman since the 2000s, Fleshman is getting gender-affirming surgery shortly after the cruise. She's planning to wear a bikini for the first time on this trip. Being here is part of her effort to meet new people and "see what society looks like" after spending her life as a self-described "street kid." She's drawn to Modest Mouse because she sees herself reflected back in Brock's songs about outcasts struggling to make sense of this life, particularly those raised in religious backgrounds who now feel alienated from the faithful.
"Their music speaks to people like me, speaks to the backgrounds of people in society that are forgotten and all fucked up," she says. "Life has put us through a lot of difficulties, and you see it in the people here. You see the tattoos that are oftentimes an expression of trauma, of owning your own body."
And then there's Jennifer Jackson, 50, and Brady Campbell, 29. The mother and son, based in Carson City, Nevada, have been attending concerts together his whole life; they can't recall if Megadeth or Sarah Brightman was his first one. Campbell enjoyed Good News For People Who Love Bad News growing up, and somewhere along the line, Modest Mouse became their band, the one he and his mom always make a point to see together. They've seen at least five Modest Mouse shows, but this weekend they're doing so with heavy hearts. Campbell's younger sister died by suicide last year, a day before her 17th birthday. Compounding the bittersweetness of this moment, her name was Pearl.
"I was so surprised and broke down in tears when I found out the name of the ship was the Pearl," Jackson says.
She took it as a sign and bought tickets immediately. Pearl never participated in the live music bond between her mom and brother, and her tastes diverged from theirs significantly. But one day Jackson heard "Ocean Breathes Salty" playing in Pearl's room and, barely believing her ears, charged in to savor the flash of common interest. When we speak Friday afternoon in the ship's cigar lounge, she's looking forward to having a moment with that song when Modest Mouse perform it here.
Jackson and Campbell have never cruised before Ice Cream Floats, but they've traveled for concerts and turned the experience into a mini-vacation. "The show is the excuse to go out of town and go somewhere and then check the area out for like two or three more days," Campbell says. So the transition to doing it on water is natural.
"I think the synergy between entertainment platforms and vacation platforms is going to start to be a bigger thing," Jackson says. "Because I think a lot of people are staying home. Or if there's a show, you can take it or leave it, or you might wait to see if tickets are still available by the night that it comes. But I think making it a full destination, and the synergy between vacation and entertainment, I think it's a hit."
She's expressing a perspective that is gaining traction in the entertainment industry. Music and other forms of entertainment have been devalued by the infinite access of streaming, even as tickets for live events are becoming prohibitively expensive. It's a recipe for the erasure of casual fandom. The way forward for artists and fans may be immersive events like these concert cruises, which aim to justify the major expenditure by going above and beyond. As the writer Joel Gouveia put it in a recent viral Substack post, "We are witnessing the death of the 'Mass Audience' and the birth of the 'Micro-Community.' The music industry has spent a decade obsessing over how to get a million people to listen to a song once. The next decade will be defined by artists figuring out how to get 1,000 people to care forever."
Hayley Williams, whose band Paramore headlined three Parahoy! cruises in the 2010s, shared that quote from Gouveia on her own Substack account with the comment, "finally. now, let's see how many majors actually get it." Like Isaac Brock, Williams is freshly liberated from her major-label contract and is releasing music through her own label now. She seems bought into the idea of operating on a smaller scale and catering to her hardcore supporters rather than trying to rope in as many casuals as possible, and she's basking in the creative and commercial freedom that comes with such an approach.
For a band like Modest Mouse, who command a devoted fan base but are no longer anywhere near the zeitgeist, it makes sense to adopt strategies like a paid fan club with exclusive perks and a Caribbean cruise that doubles as a music festival. That might be a lot more challenging for an artist just starting out, who hasn't benefitted from the kind of platform once enjoyed by alt-rock radio household names like Modest Mouse and Paramore. It's a pickle for upstart performers, but there are still genuine talents out there finding ways to build up a following in this new landscape, so I'm more inclined to worry about this evolution from the fan perspective. Where does all this catering to superfans leave people who can't afford an experience like Ice Cream Floats? Presumably, on the outside looking in, racked with FOMO and frustration.
Those who were able to be here really seem to relish it. I smile when I notice Collins, who sought better ADA accommodations, rocking out to Ugly Casanova with an unobstructed view, a handsewn "Joy Is An Act Of Resistance" patch on the back of her power chair. I laugh when Fleshman, who is here to make friends and relaunch her life, gets into some banter with David Cross from the audience during his standup set. When Modest Mouse play "Ocean Breathes Salty," my mind goes straight to Jackson and Campbell, who are here in honor of their beloved Pearl. It's a painful epiphany when I remember how the song ends: "You wasted life, why wouldn't you waste the afterlife?" I hope this moment is cathartic for them all the same.
***
I have to confess that my first reaction to a Modest Mouse cruise was lol. It's not just that Modest Mouse seemed like an odd fit for a Caribbean cruise; it's that I couldn't imagine caring enough about Modest Mouse in 2026 to shell out thousands of dollars for this experience. The band used to be very important to me, but to my ears they haven't released an essential album in two decades, and I doubt they'll ever put out another record that transports me like The Moon And Antarctica did when I was 17. The newer music is mostly likable; it just feels obligatory in a way most bands' music starts to feel as they get older.
On the other hand, at age 42, I am a shameless fanboy for plenty of bands that are creatively past their primes. The last Wilco album I love with all my heart came out the same year as "Float On," and I'd be delighted to go to their annual Mexican resort festival. The National fell off sometime in the past decade, and if they ever organized a cruise, I would do everything in my power to be there, embracing the absurdity of it all. A white midwestern dad who's obsessed with Wilco and the National? I am a trope, a punchline, a walking cliché. Some people would consider my intense devotion to these groups embarrassing, but I don't care. They mean too much to me.
So why have I latched onto those bands and drifted apart from Modest Mouse? There could be differences in social class and self-image at play, perhaps even geography. Maybe I'd be more inclined to follow Brock into the long tail of his career if I felt like more of an outcast, marginalized and beaten down by society, and I sensed he was speaking for me. Maybe if I was more blue-collar or less self-conscious, they'd have become a pillar of my personality instead of the equivalent of an old high school friend whose posts I see on Facebook sometimes. Maybe I hear more of myself reflected back in the earnestness, the elegance, the rocking-but-not-too-hard politeness of those NPR dad bands. Or maybe the stuffy prestige of bands like Wilco and the National is aspirational for me, and for better or worse, I see in them some version of the me I want to be.
There are some things in life we cling to because they bring us joy, because they've shaped our self-conception, because they've touched our soul in some deep way, and fuck everybody else if they don't get it. Those kinds of passions can help us understand ourselves better, and they can just as easily surprise us, spurring us to go places we never thought we'd go and do things we never thought we'd do. They might even inspire us to get over ourselves, set aside our fear and loathing for the cruise industry, and hop on a boat, cultural connotation be damned. Love is a game of compromises.
Until Ice Cream Floats, it had never occurred to me that people might still be checking for Modest Mouse like that. But after four days on the Norwegian Pearl, I understand the cult of Brock a little better. The performances, weighted as they are toward the first half of the band's career, are a nice reminder of how much heat they were throwing in their glory days. But more important than the quality of the setlists is the reverence people maintain for those songs and the musicians who made them. The floaters have glimpsed something profound in Modest Mouse's music. It has helped them in their quest to make sense of the world. A lifetime of memories is tied up in it. They gravitate towards it, and in their moments of joy and pain, they lean on it.
Would I be so woo-woo about all this if I'd gone on the Train cruise instead? Almost assuredly not. If you generally like an artist, these concert cruises will make a bigger fan out of you, and if you're already a superfan, a few days on one of these ships amongst your people might feel like heaven. But wow, what a nightmare this event would be if the music was actively off-putting. Even if I would prefer to hear "Teeth Like God's Shoeshine," I can relate to somebody who had an out-of-body experience during "Spittin' Venom." But someone who saw God during "Hey Soul Sister"? I'm happy for them, and I'm even happier to scoff at them.
***
The beekeeper's suit makes so much more sense now.
When I catch up with Brock via video chat a few weeks after the cruise, he is carrying a honeycomb to his kitchen and trying to separate wax from honey. It occurs to me that the beekeeping apparel he was rocking on the Pearl is not just a costume. It's something he bought for actually tending to bees. "I'm a fiscally sound dude," he explains, a man who gets the most out of his items.
Brock tells me that when we spoke on the ship, I got "the hand-wringing version of the interview," but he was ultimately thrilled with his cruise experience. Sure, the schedule was demanding. And yeah, he had some awkward interactions with fans, like the guy who was trying to determine if he was present for Modest Mouse's final show with the late Jeremiah Green for clout. And yet, Brock concludes, "I walked away from that thing feeling fucking rad, man." He'd gladly do it again. Two years from now, he probably will.
In the meantime, he's getting ready to roll out a new album, his first in half a decade. He wishes Modest Mouse records would come out faster, that he could just bang them out in a weekend, first-thought best-thought. When I ask if the demands of family life slow down the process, he instead puts it on himself. Owning a studio makes it tempting to indulge every idea, so he piles on elements, then starts peeling them back, always trying to find some variable that will push a song to the next level, never sure when a track is complete. Even though he believes "the idea is usually best for the most part within the first week — honestly, within the first day," he can't help himself.
After another long gap between albums, he's antsy for this one to finally be out, not least of all because he knows the fans are counting on it. "I'm just interested to see that the record connects with people in a way that is meaningful," Brock says. "This one, I feel like there's at least a few songs that I think are useful things, tools to have in life. And I don't actually feel that way all the time about my music, but I feel like a few songs on this one actually are me doing my best job to genuinely give people fucking coping mechanisms."
Despite Brock's reputation as a misanthrope, he seems energized by the pursuit of great conversation. He can still be prickly, profane, and intensely cynical. "I just say shitty things for the fuck of it," he admits. Judging from the tangents he embarks on during our chats, he seemingly would rather talk about anything but Modest Mouse: my kids, my friends' landscape design business, the Trump administration setting vaccine research back by a decade or more. But it's clear he still cares about the band and the impact it has in listeners' lives.
For the kind of Modest Mouse fan who made the effort to be at Ice Cream Floats, an album is not just a chance to change up the video graphics on tour (although Brock is stoked about the new project's artwork). It's more than a formality. These people are in it for the long haul. It's why no matter how corny a Modest Mouse cruise might be in theory, it was always going to be a magical time for the intended audience, as long as the band moved past the lol phase and took it seriously.
"It was never a good idea," Brock says. "It was just a funny idea, when you're like, 'Wouldn't that be an odd thing to do?' And then you realize you're doing it, and, it's like, 'Wait. That means you're the punchline to a fucking joke.' And by the time I was done, I was like, 'No, this is just great.' It's everything everyone always wishes a festival would be."
