Photo by Nabil
Not so long ago, it wouldn't have made much sense at all for Metallica to choose Foals to play their music festival. But with Holy Fire, the Oxford band's muscular recent Flood and Alan Moulder-produced album, Foals stop noodling in the margins of rock and run headlong into its belly, blending the careening swagger of stoner rock with a sleazy funk thrust-- all without sounding anything like the Red Hot Chili Peppers, thank God. And within that hypnotic thrust, Holy Fire hits some restful-if-anxious points, too; "Providence", for one, dusts itself off with a vocal line from frontman Yannis Philippakis processed to sound like an old Lomax recording, as he explains when we chat by phone in early February.
While touring behind Foals' last album, 2010's Total Life Forever, Philippakis often appeared in quite battered form, turning up to interviews with yellowed eyes, a spotty tongue, a packet of quickly chain-smoked cigarettes, and on one occasion, a bottle of cough syrup. Certain stories made him appear in a harrowed, panicked place, a portrayal he now says was perhaps slightly exaggerated due to his willingness to let journalists into his troubled mindset. For now, though, "it's an era of contentment" for him and the band. "With this music malarkey, I used to bang my head against the wall, but now I've learned the way through the maze a bit better," he says. "I can still get lost, but my emotional equilibrium isn't as tied into it."
He makes himself subject to quite a tongue-lashing on Holy Fire, however, berating his unfaithfulness and bad habits in order to "feel uncomfortable" when listening to the new material. We spoke about the pitfalls of writing cryptic, self-referential lyrics that don't cop to much, how Flood and Moulder played tricks on them during the album's recording, and why he's recently taken up growing roses. Read the interview and watch the band perform Holy Fire outtake "Blue Bird" below:
Pitchfork: Parts of Holy Fire comprise some of the most aggressive music the band has ever made, but you're singing your most open and vulnerable lyrics. What provoked that?
Yannis Philippakis: I'm just worn down and weary of bands whose lyrics are cryptic and self-referential. I don't get any humanity when I listen to that, so I really wanted to avoid it. You can get into a comfort zone writing lyrics, like wearing a mask. But I wanted to feel uncomfortable when I was listening back to [the lyrics]; I wanted to squirm. I never want to listen to the songs in front of people close to me. There's an emotional honesty in that place where it's not earnest but it's vulnerable.
Pitchfork: You self-flagellate a lot over the course of the record.
YP: Oh yeah. I'm taking a bath in my guilt, but there's a redemptive purpose to that. It's not as if I'm endlessly throwing out a trail of images that can never be traced back to me; I can see the traces of myself, and I wanted it to be a cathartic process, to grow and work through the knots of my personality. Music was my friend when I was a teenager, and I would inhabit and take comfort in lyrics. That's how I want to write. I like simple writing. I'd rather read Hemingway than Burroughs.
It's a hard thing to do when you first start as a band. The lyrics on our first record epitomize a fear of being found out, or of being too known. You feel vulnerable and you want to hide it. But now I feel like a middle-aged woman who's just gone through a divorce, and she's looking in the mirror and is OK with herself-- I can get up in the morning and look at myself in the mirror and say that I'm a beautiful woman and believe it.
"We wanted to do something that felt like this sweaty, stickier thing--like an insect climbing into delta marshlands."
Pitchfork: Tell me about what's going on at the beginning of "Providence"-- your voice is captured in a way that makes it feel like an old field recording.
YP: On that vocal, I was definitely inspired by gospel music, or old-school R&B; I got into some Good God gospel compilations. I like the fervor of religious music, the zealous aspect-- that preachers can go from a conversational cadence into this passionate singing. And I've been listening to Alan Lomax's recordings for about five years years now. They've never failed to startle and move me, they're so skeletal and haunting that I can't see how anyone wouldn't be absolutely stunned by them. You realize how much power and emotion can come out of a voice. It was a sign that we didn't need to rely on gimmicks or crutches, or have a lot of bolstering sound.
Pitchfork: You wrote some of the record in Karpathos, Greece, where your father lives, and a few of the songs on the record appeal to a mother figure. Was your heritage on your mind?
YP: That's hard-- I'm definitely preoccupied by thinking I'm just a biological thing. I want to feel that there's more, but so often I'm reminded of how we're just like baboons, basically. The thing about Karpathos that made it such a good place to write lyrics is that there's no wifi, no cars, none of the pernicious side of modern or urban society. Instead, there's mountains and a feeling of timelessness, it's unchanging. I can feel my bloodlines there. I don't know how it creeps into the lyrics, but its definitely part of my brain structure.
Pitchfork: It definitely feels like Foals' most varied album from start to finish.
YP: When we started writing, we wanted to free ourselves from the shackles of keeping things harmonious. It was informed by a confidence in the band-- we feel we will immutably sound like ourselves no matter which producer we work with, or what palette the songs are written in, or what the medium is. The headspace was: "Let's not overthink it, let's not discuss it, let's just enjoy everything, and if things feel intuitively right, then be OK with it."
Also, Flood and Moulder really reinforced our belief that we should try and fan everything out. If we had two songs that felt like they were occupying the same space, we would consciously try and push them apart from each other as much as possible. This record is a myriad of colors rather than shades of the same.
"When you're making an album with people who made
your favorite records as a rebellious teenager,
it feels like you've achieved something."
Pitchfork: I read that Flood and Moulder double-bluffed you by saying you were doing practice takes, then telling you that they had actually recorded them.
YP: It was sneaky and genius of them. I don't know if it's plagued us more than other people, but when we became conscious of the red light going on for a take, it would somehow creep into the playing. There'd be something missing, or there wasn't the kind of feral energy that there would be in the live shows. That sleight-of-hand totally navigated that problem-- there was a charm to a lot of those takes, so we didn't need to do much more.
Pitchfork: The producers you've worked with previously have all essentially been your peers.
YP: And musicians in some way. Flood and Moulder are definitely not musicians, they're producers and engineers, studio men. And they come from that old tradition of British studios, it's almost like a guild. They understand that there's a line between the artist and the songs they've written, and their job is to convey that from the speakers. It meant we didn't ever really feel territorial about what was happening. It's an honor to work with them as much as anything. I grew up listening to The Downward Spiral and Mellon Collie; when you're making an album with people who made your favorite records as a rebellious teenager, it feels like you've achieved something.
Pitchfork: There was always a positive disparity between your records and the significantly heavier shows. Do you feel Holy Fire comes closer to capturing what you're actually like on stage?
YP: Yeah. It's not just the heavier songs, like "Providence" and "Inhaler", that have that sort of energy, but also songs like "Moon" and "Stepson", where me and [guitarist] Jimmy [Smith] were allowed to go in the studio and just play the same song for five hours without interruption, over and over 'til we were tired of playing it or the wine made our eyelids droop. Someone in the control room would capture it. The integrity of the takes remain.
"Inhaler" almost didn't make it on the record-- when we got back to Oxford after tour, it got extended and became a 27-minute-long beast. We had it on the back-burner, then had three days where we were like, "Let's just give this a go," and it came together, thankfully.
Pitchfork: I've always thought it would be interesting to hear you guys release something long-form.
YP: We'd like to do that. It's strange because there's a tension in the band that's almost bipolar-- if we were left totally to our own devices, we probably would just turn out these proggy jams without focus. But at the same time, there's a desire to make things that are concise and that communicate to the outside world. There's a special edition of Holy Fire that's got all the fragments and loops and jams that informed the actual album. It'll expose the process, show the skeletons.
Pitchfork: Was the stoner rock quality a sound that had always been a part of the band? What made now the time to make a record in that vein?
YP: I've always listened to stuff like Earth, Sleep, and Sabbath, though we didn't have a desire to actually go to that territory before; we don't need to put a little ribbon around what somebody else's idea of what we should sound like is and just adhere to that.
After touring Total Life for so long, we infinitely know the boundaries and parameters of what we had written up until then. Being given a new lease of life to go and write was exciting-- everything felt fertile and new. It's about writing the next sentence, and we got it in our heads that we wanted to do something that felt-- and I don't think the whole record feels like it-- like this sweaty, stickier thing, like an insect climbing into delta marshlands.
Pitchfork: Am I right in thinking you've taken up gardening?
YP: Yeah. My mum used to make me garden when I was younger, then I just stopped doing it. Then I got a craving to do something that felt like it was connected with the land, something that felt domestic. It was grounding for me. I started growing roses. I enjoyed the craft of it and that they're difficult to look after; they can provide joy. But I'm going on tour now so I don't know what will happen to them.
Pitchfork: You're about to go on the road for ages, but you recently tweeted that you wanted to make another album already as well.
YP: What we might start trying to do whenever we get a free day on tour is go into a studio and cut tracks, like how it used to be done; you'd cut a song and it'd be pressed and it would go out. A good thing about the industry changing is that it frees up the artist to disseminate music in various ways. One thing we're going to have to do in our lifetime is free ourselves from the shackle of making albums that are the focal point for everything for two years on either side. It's great in the sense that it's a big task and enjoyable to craft something from start to finish, but it's not natural. The way we write is compulsive, all the time. It'd be nice to have that direct outlet.