Foals
“The band’s always been in this bipolar state,” says Foals frontman Yannis Philippakis, “of wanting to have its cake and eat it. We’re making what we feel is pop music, but on our own terms—we want it to feel fresh and not pandering to something.”
On their 2008 debut, Antidotes, Foals were crowned the unlikely art-school-freak kings of indie rock: blending math-rock guitar pyrotechnics with percussive gymnastics and Afro-pop horns, Philippakis spewing fractured lyrical abstractions over the hypnotic din. With 2010’s Total Life Forever, they deepened and expanded their palette, smoothing out their spazzy, show-off edges and adding a broader emotional grandeur. The Oxford-based quintet’s sound has certainly grown warmer and more accessible with age: On their new album, Holy Fire, they finally sound at ease with being normal human beings, no longer hiding their emotions behind abstraction and musical layers. They’ve entered a more raw, unguarded space—less bipolar than universal.
“It was more governed by instinctual feeling than the previous two records,” Philippakis says, “so we kind of just followed our internal compass. When we finished touring Total Life, we knew the boundaries of the songs of what we’d written to prior. We played all the songs 100 times on both records, and we understood where we wanted to go to: We wanted to have a record that had more girth and heft to it and also captured the intensity of our live shows. And we didn’t feel like we’d done that before.”
After their final burst of Total Life touring, the band nestled into an Oxford house with an adjacent studio, where they jammed and wrote with a newfound spark of spontaneity, channeling the muscle and passion of soul and funk music. “It was totally free,” he continues. “We had keys to [the studio], so we could write all night. Sometimes it’d be all five of us, sometimes it’d be a couple of us. It was a very fluid process, and it wasn’t very regimented.”
But, as Philippakis notes, Foals “needed an adult in the room.” The band earned a reputation early on for being hard-headed and rebellious with producers (They famously rejected a reverb-heavy mix of Antidotes from TV on the Radio’s Dave Sitek), but the problem for Foals has been finding the right collaborator—one who can humanize and color their sound instead of obscure it. On Holy Fire, they found two: Flood and Alan Moulder, one of the most reputable production duos in the history of pop music.
“We were obviously fans,” Philippakis says. “We were of that age—we grew up listening to The Downward Spiral and Mellon Collie and stuff like that, and Depeche Mode. Alan mixed our last record, Total Life Forever, and I sat in on the mixing session, and we were really happy with the mix, so sonically, we felt like he’d be a good person to work with, and it just kind of came about that Flood was interested too. We just got a call that they were interested in doing a co-production—which we felt was a real coup because they’ve only done that three times before. It was really flattering.”
Though the band met with other producers (“We were even joking about working with Pharrell Williams,” Philippakis laughs), they felt immediately secure with Flood and Moulder, who helped shape the new material during liberating sessions in North London. “It just felt right—it felt like the ambitions were right. Again, it was just governed by a gut feeling.”
“What appealed to us is their ability to make records that are greedy in a way,” Philippakis continues. “They’re often left-field records that have an experimental ambition, not pandering to current trends. They make records that feel timeless, and they never sacrifice their artistic integrity. But they also have the ability to sound big and have the ability to communicate to a lot of people.”
And Holy Fire is all of those things at once: It’s their biggest-sounding album, and also their most accessible.