Life Is Yours Foals

• 1 Life Is Yours 04:12
• 2 Wake Me Up 04:23
• 3 2am 03:44
• 4 2001 04:26
• 5 (summer sky) 00:36
• 6 Flutter 03:35
• 7 Looking High 04:21
• 8 Under The Radar 02:59
• 9 Crest of the Wave 03:46
• 10 The Sound 04:25
• 11 Wild Green 05:27
• Total Runtime 41:54

Info for Life Is Yours

Life Is Yours marks a natural evolution for Foals, its disco-tinged guitars, tight syncopated rhythms and punchy, insistent hooks echoing their roots as purveyors of rambunctious house party chaos. It’s a record that’s perfectly in tune with the prevailing atmosphere of this moment in time – a life-affirming celebration as the world is reunited. Life Is Yours immediately establishes its tone with the bright beam of optimism provided by its title track. Its ambience and exuberance proving that the band has no intention of slowing down. There’s a unity to the sound, whether Foals are bouncing into ‘Looking High’, experimenting with West African guitar grooves on ‘Flutter’, or savouring the prospect of playing live together again within the dance dynamics of ‘The Sound’. It all comes full circle with ‘Wild Green’, which simultaneously celebrates the rebirth of summer with an existential tinge that all beautiful moments are inevitably fleeting.

Foals – completed by Jimmy Smith and Jack Bevan – started the project within the dark, windowless confines of their south London rehearsal space during the winter lockdown. Feeling contained and tethered, they were drawn towards spirited sounds that looked to a brighter future, not only in terms of climate but also in terms of the unreplicable thrill of performing live. By the time the process reached its conclusion, the verdant summer surroundings of Real World Studios near Bath matched the album’s ardent atmosphere.

“We wanted to refocus and do something that shared a DNA throughout the songs: a physicality, a danceability, and with energy and joyousness. It’s definitely the poppiest record we’ve ever made. I feel that with Everything Not Saved… we touched upon all of the facets of our sound up until that point. This time we wanted to find a new way to express ourselves.” (Yannis Philippakis)

“Wake Me Up” was highlighted during the most recent Super Bowl as well as the NFL’s Super Wild Card Weekend on NBC, and it is included in Fortnite’s Rock & Royale radio station. The band also shared the music video for “2am” directed by Tanu Muiño and filmed in Kiev with an entirely Ukrainian crew. The Ukrainian director is best known for helming one of the biggest videos of recent years with Lil Nas X’s “Montero.”

Foals

Foals
From playing chaotic house parties in their home city of Oxford to becoming major festival headliners across Europe, Foals’ trajectory has been remarkable. They’ve earned critical acclaim (NME and Q Award wins, plus Mercury Prize, Ivor Novello and BRIT Award nominations) and fan devotion (1.7 million sales of their four Gold-certified albums) in equal measure. And while the majority of contemporaries have fallen by the wayside, Foals continue to hit new peaks.

What’s more, they’ve achieved it all on their own terms. “We’ve never been a straight-up pop band, we’ve never tried to make a hit,” observes frontman Yannis Philippakis. “From the beginning, we’ve come at it from an unorthodox angle.”

After more than a decade in the game, Foals again embrace that love for the unconventional with the bravest and most ambitious project of their career: not one, but two astonishing new albums: ‘Everything Not Saved Will Be Lost’. A pair of releases, separate but related. They share a title, themes and artwork. “Two halves of the same locket,” Yannis explains, with the first of the pair emerging in March and the second following later in the year.

“They can be listened to and appreciated individually, but fundamentally, they are companion pieces,” he states. Musically they explore uncharted sonic territories for the group. Fundamentally tethered but possessing their own personalities, the two bodies capture the most compelling, ambitious and cohesive creations they’ve ever produced.

The new albums’ journeys began as the ‘What Went Down’ era ended. Founding bassist Walter Gervers departed on amicable terms after playing the Festival Paredes de Coura in Portugal in August 2017. Foals felt that he couldn’t be replaced – a decision that ushered in a period of recalibration, reorganisation and, ultimately, rejuvenation.

After taking a little time out, Yannis, Jimmy (Smith, guitar), Jack (Bevan, drums) and Edwin (Congreave, keys) had decided to self-produce their new music, sharing duties on bass. They began by writing in a rehearsal space before exporting those sketches into the recording phase at 123 Studios, Peckham, with the assistance of engineer Brett Shaw. They’d repeat the cycle between the two spaces, effectively “creating an ongoing feedback loop” as they sought to “push every new idea to the finish line.”

“There was no time pressure, no deadline and no real worry of expense,” says Yannis. “This was the time for us to put our money where our mouth is and itch what’s needed to be scratched for a while, to make Foals 100% concentrated, no dilution.”

While the concept behind the album breaks new ground, the music also finds Foals leaping into new territory. Eager to break the traditional pop song structure which they felt they were becoming increasingly tapered to, the 20 tracks defy expectation. There are exploratory, progressive-tinged tracks which occasionally break the 10-minute mark alongside atmospheric segues which make the music an experience rather than a mere collection of songs. Yet the band’s renowned ability to wield relentless grooves with striking power and skyscraper hooks also reaches new heights.

Lead track ‘Exits’ is case in point, with Philippakis conjuring the image of a disorienting world “upside down” via a contagious vocal melody. It’s a fresh anthem for Foals’ formidable arsenal, but also an ominous forecast.

“There’s a definite idea about the world being no longer habitable in the way that it was,” says Yannis. “A kind of perilousness lack of predictability and a feeling of being overwhelmed by the magnitudes of the problems we face. What’s the response? And what’s the purpose of any response that one individual can have?”

‘Exits’ signposts what to expect thematically from both instalments of ‘Everything Not Saved Will Be Lost’. The title is a warning that anything – from the tiniest fleeting moment of inspiration through to the planet’s own biological diversity – can be under threat of being irrevocably erased.

It’s a theme that permeates throughout the album’s material, as Foal mirror the public neuroses that have been provoked by our current cultural climate. Paranoia of state surveillance? Fear of environmental collapse? Anxiety over Trump’s next potentially cataclysmic move? It’s all there in these apocalyptic songs.

It’s particularly evident in the euphoric ‘In Degrees’ which imagines a future “where your ability to talk to each other has been reduced to nothing”. It’s a message that can be interpreted on multiple levels. It could be the personal fear of a failing relationship, or a grand scale, Black Mirror-styled vision of a dystopian future.

This approach is perhaps most vividly captured on ‘Syrups’, and the devastating closing pair of songs on the first album, ‘Sunday’ and ‘I’m Done With The World (& It’s Done With Me)’. The latter is “a song basically written for a future child, having this fear that they’re not going to be able to experience nature in the way we did.”

“Lyrically, there are resonances with what’s going on in the world at the moment,” summarises Yannis. “I wrote the lyrics for this record from the viewpoint of sitting and looking out through a big glass window and wanting to observe the world from the sixth floor of a building. Like having this panoptic view of stuff, rather than writing in a closed room – it was important to start to allow a bit more of that in.”

“I just feel like, what’s the utility of being a musician these days, if you can’t engage with at least some of this stuff?” he continues. “These songs are white flags, or they’re SOSs, or they’re cries for help… each in a different way.”

While the world’s ever more unpredictable ways are potentially something to fear, Foals’ constant willingness to reinvent themselves is something to celebrate.

“We’ve shed different skins as a band. We’ve been a band that have played underground house parties, a band that have played Fabric, rock festivals… we’ve lived a lot of lives,” reflects Yannis, sounding invigorated. “At a time when a lot of the music landscape has changed and fallen away… to still feel as creatively potent as we did in the beginning, if not more so, is the biggest thing. It feels good to feel like we’re an important, interesting, alive band.”

In a contemporary climate of few concrete certainties, Amen to one of them.

This album contains no booklet.