Foals’ Yannis Philippakis Breaks Down Every Song on Life Is Yours – Spin

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 bands sound.

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

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 thats out there, I think that was an important sentiment to tap into. The song is set in the Pacific Northwest where Ive spent quite a lot of time. Theres something really fresh about the boreal forests on the coast. It felt fresh, and sonically its fresh for us too. Weve not touched upon that aesthetic before, or that way of putting a song together.

Theres 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.

Musically 2am is one of the poppiest songs weve ever written. Its about repetitive cycles of destructive behavior, which I think lots of people can relate to, and certainly its an expression of something that I struggle with. Theres something cathartic about expressing that feeling to this upbeat music thats got a sense of release and the hope ofresolution.

2001 feels like a postcard from the past. Its 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, youre 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 theres an escapist desire to break out from the feeling of being cooped up, both in terms of the pandemic and adolescence.

Flutter is one of my favourite songs on the record. Ive 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 didnt want to take it into a huge dynamic range. Its one of the more narrative songs on the album. Its essentially about someone fleeing and you never see them again. Theres no closure, and no neat tying up of the emotion that comes from someone departing so suddenly.

Lyrically this is looking back to a more hedonistic time in my life, and a more innocent time in society in general, pre-pandemic and before the existential threat of climate change. It takes place in an alley in Oxford with two clubs-The Cellar and The Wheatsheaf-that all of the citys nightlife gravitated towards. It was before clubs started to close down and before our cities started to change into more corporate, arid places. Theres an element of being haunted by nightlife thats no longer there. Jimmy wrote the demo for this, and it was originally a kind of a slower, Prince-ier creature. When we took it into the live room, the tempo accelerated. We were reveling playing live together again and feeding off each others energy.

This is one of the most new wave songs weve ever written. It felt like a forgotten Pixies song to me, like a view of the future from the 1950s with a surreal, slightly sci-fi element to it. Its talking about isolation and loneliness in the modern age and wanting to be transported to anywhere else other than where you are at that time. But I wanted it to keep it very playful rather than being heavy-handed, with fractured images and a collage of images in its emotions and words.

A portion of it existed in 2011, and we had demoed it in Australia and just left it for years. But it was one of those songs which had always been at the back of our minds, like there was some unfinished business there. As we wereplaying around with it with some of the themes on this record, we cracked it open and really revelled in adding lots of layers to it in the studio. Its another transportive song. Its set in St. Lucia, which has always struck me as being very powerful visually, with the mountain plummeting into the sea.

The Sound couldve been played at one of the nights I was talking about in Looking High. Musically its interesting in how it takes from UK dance, house and garage, but then the guitar top line comes from a different world. Somehow the combination of all of those facets makes something really fresh and fun. Its going to be a really great one to play live. Aesthetically I wanted it to be surreal and industrial, and contrast the precision of the tune with the freedom of its words.

We recorded this in Real World Studios, where we looked out at this verdant British summer scene, with dragonflies and kingfishers flying around. Its a song that feels alive in the same way that the summer time feels alive with pollen and creatures; this tapestry of life thats reemerging. Hopefully it mirrors the reemergence of our world coming back together out of the pandemic. Its optimistic, but theres a melancholy to it. However long a summer is, we know its ephemeral So, the second half turns into a farewell, an elegy. We knew right from the beginning that this was going to be the album closer and its one of my favorite songs on the record.

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Foals' Yannis Philippakis Breaks Down Every Song on Life Is Yours - Spin