Comes on vinyl LP.

For the first time in nearly three years, British rockers Foals are back with new music. Titled Life Is Yours, even with the world in the tumultuous state its in, the group tries to be optimistic about their outlook. This is reflected by the strength of its lyrics and the experimental nature of the band’s sound.

With the album out now, we asked Foals singer Yannis Philippakis to give us the stories behind the songs on Life Is Yours. Here’s what he had to say.

“Life Is Yours”
“Life Is Yours” contains the sentiment of the album at large, which is about an optimistic spirit, and being in rapture at the possibilities of life. With the shadow of the pandemic and climate change, and the feeling of jeopardy that’s out there, I think that was an important sentiment to tap into. The song is set in the Pacific Northwest where I’ve spent quite a lot of time. There’s something really fresh about the boreal forests on the coast. It felt fresh, and sonically it’s fresh for us too. We’ve not touched upon that aesthetic before, or that way of putting a song together.

“Wake Me Up”
There’s a journey that the band has gone on experimenting with different palettes of sound. This time there was a desire to take it back to more of the initial idea of the band, where the rhythm, the grooves and the guitars are interlocking architecturally. We wanted to tap into the physicality of music. And we wanted it to feel good. Lyrically, I just wanted to write a song about transporting yourself to a better, idyllic situation.

“2am”
Musically “2am” is one of the poppiest songs we’ve ever written. It’s about repetitive cycles of destructive behavior, which I think lots of people can relate to, and certainly it’s an expression of something that I struggle with. There’s something cathartic about expressing that feeling to this upbeat music that’s got a sense of release and the hope of
resolution.

“2001”
“2001” feels like a postcard from the past. It’s a very summery, disco-sounding track, and I felt the visual landscape for it should be Brighton. We moved there around that time, we were a young band, and there was the feeling of the first taste of independence. The moment you get those freedoms, you’re surrounded by temptation. The references to beachside candy and Brighton rock are symbols for drugs and hedonism. This was written in the depths of the pandemic winter, and there’s an escapist desire to break out from the feeling of being cooped up, both in terms of the pandemic and adolescence.

“Flutter”
‘Flutter’ is one of my favourite songs on the record. I’ve always been a fan of Malian and Senegelese guitar players, and this song evolved very naturally out of a jam that came from that kind of groove. We wanted this song to just chug, we didn’t want to take it into a huge dynamic range. It’s one of the more narrative songs on the album. It’s essentially about someone fleeing and you never see them again. There’s no closure, and no neat tying up of the emotion that comes from someone departing so suddenly.

source www.spin.com