The French Open Foals’ track-by-track guide to their Afrobeat and krautrock-inspired new album, ‘What Went Down’
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“WE WANTED IT TO BE LIKE THE MOMENT A pREDATORY ANIMAL GOES IN FOR THE KILL” YANNIS pHILIppAKIS seems coolly confdent. “This is the record that most closely mimics the sound in our heads,” he says. “We wanted it to be lean. Both in the individual songs – less reverb, more punchy – but also as an album, so there wasn’t any negative space. We wanted to put the absolute best on there, and the 10 that made it are those that all of us were unanimous in liking.” Here the pair talk us through those tracks…
►WHAT WENT DOWN Yannis Philippakis: “The recorded version is the frst one we ever played. I re-recorded the vocals but the rest of it is raw. It’s one of those moments if you’re lucky where things seem to materialise fully formed. We wanted it to feel like the moment when a predatory animal goes in for the kill: there’s a savagery to it.”
►MOUNTAIN AT MY GATES Philippakis: “I’d recorded the beginning rif on my phone ages ago. At the beginning it had a baggy feel, but became less so with more work. The central image – ‘I see a mountain at my gates’ – was from me getting more interested in seeing what would come out lyrically when Ne w Mu s ical e x pre s s | 1 8 j uly 201 5
there wasn’t a preconceived idea. Normally I write voraciously in books and journals, then harvest a lot of that for the record. This, though, came out instantaneously in the room.”
►BIRCH TREE Philippakis: “This was written when me and Jimmy were hungover in Utrecht, onstage doing a soundcheck. It felt kind of consoling at the time. Then we worked on it in Oxford, and I got really into this boxy old drum machine, and so the kind of hip-hop quality of the groove came from that. It feels summery to me; it has a sense of what West Coast music should be.”
►GIVE IT ALL Philippakis: “That was one where it felt like stripping all the support and architecture of the band away and allowing it to be just a vocal and some chords. That song, more than anything we’ve ever done, has been led by its vocal. It felt like the purest bit of songwriting we’d ever done. It felt like a step forward.”
►ALBATROSS Jimmy Smith: “Chord-ally speaking, it’s one of the most interesting things we’ve done. It goes
NAbIl EldErkIN, kIt moNtEItH, ANdY HuGHES
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f you’ve trodden the traditional ‘indie tykes to accomplished musicians to stadium sound’ narrative arc, where do you go next? If you’re Foals, it turns out you barely blink. After writing ‘What Went Down’ – which is set for release on August 28 – in Oxford for nearly six months, in early 2015 they decamped to the south of France to record. They holed up at La Fabrique in Saint-Rémy-de Provence, a studio that has recently hosted Morrissey’s comeback album ‘World Peace Is None Of Your Business’ and Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds’ ‘Push The Sky Away’, bringing along James Ford – the indie producer of the moment – who seems to have had a laid-back approach to making the follow-up to 2013’s ‘Holy Fire’. “James didn’t want to channel anything into clear pathways,” guitarist Jimmy Smith states when we meet him and frontman Yannis Philippakis on the roof terrace of the north London practice studio where the Foals are working on their new live show. “Unlike other producers we’ve worked with, it was refreshing to see him just nudge things along.” The results take the band into a realm that pushes at all the seams of what Foals can be – without sounding alien or difcult. It’s a record that is in parts sparser than ‘Spanish Sahara’ and in others more big rifng than ‘Inhaler’. It highlights their way with chartfriendly, pastel-favoured indie, yet yawns with its own existential bleakness, sometimes on the same tracks. Often laid down in one or two takes, it’s the freshest, most punk rock Foals album since their 2008 debut, ‘Antidotes’. Philippakis
