Yannis Philippakis sounds irritated. The Foals’ singer is sitting in a hotel lobby in Budapest and there’s what he terms “lobby music” being cranked out at full volume. The lounge muzak is so loud it can be heard on the other end of the phone line. Eventually, Philippakis moves away to find somewhere quieter to sit and talk.
You get the sense that a minor inconvenience like this – or the fact that the phone line breaks down a couple of times during the interview – irks the hell out of Philippakis. In conversation, he comes across as serious, driven and kind of intense. Onstage with Foals, all of these qualities are amplified and exaggerated to produce a live show that is exuberant, sweaty and quite compelling.
Philippakis says the intensity that powers much of the band's new album, What Went Down, owes a lot to what happens at those gigs. "I can't really explain the intensity because it feels natural and it may be something which has fed off the live performances over the last few years particularly," he says.
"The live shows got to the point where the things I was doing vocally and physically took that intensity to the max. After that, it didn't feel like a big step to write What Went Down. None of us stopped and said 'this is not Foals', it felt right and natural and we didn't need to second-guess ourselves."
The new album is an interesting beast, another indication of the Oxford band's willingness to try out new threads. The title track is a thundering, thumping belter, more akin to the scrappy, angular DIY post-punk of their earlier days than anything of late. That said, there's plenty here too with a similar sweep to the passionate grooves of their last album, Holy Fire, or the emotional widths and depths of 2010's Total Life Forever.
Mood in the camp
All of which indicates that Foals are happy in their musical unpredictability, something Philippakis puts down to the mood in the camp when they started writing for the new album.
“The five of us were in a small room in Oxford in autumn going into winter after a long tour and there was a charged energy in the room. There are always things going on in our personal lives and there’s a temperature to everyone’s life which varies from person to person, but it was a great writing process this time, it was really fluid.
"One day, we'd go in and have all the amps turned up and we'd rock out all day and it felt like our ideal of a punk band. It felt we were Fugazi or The Pixies. The next day, you'd go in and we'd sit down and write one of the quiet songs on the record like London Thunder. Everything was fresh and quick and we didn't allow much time for analysis."
The analysis came later and when Philippakis looked back on the songs, he found themes to do with time and age popping up throughout the lyrics. "I view time as an enemy," he says. "People joke about me and my restlessness, but I can't sit still. If I've a day off, I go to bed feeling like I haven't done enough in the day. I want to out-run time and I suppose it's an age thing too with my 30s coming and the lyrics on the record for sure reflect that, like on Birch Tree, for example."
Some interesting insights also came via some old diaries. “I keep a journal and I’ve kept it since I was 12. I don’t go back and look at it all that often, but I did at one point and I remember reading some of the stuff and it was strange.
“When you look back, you see yourself as a linear thing and you grow up from one age to the next and you’re one person. But the more I read the journal, the more I couldn’t recognise the people in the entries.
"I'm very interested in that idea about our perception of ourselves and how the sense of self is a bit of a trick. The person I am when I am checking out of a hotel or calling my mum is not the same person necessarily who is singing What Went Down.
“There’s a thing you have to channel and I’ve got better over the years at doing that. But I also think it’s about timing: this is the right time for me to do this. I couldn’t have attempted that a few years ago.
“As a 19 or 20 year-old, I’d never have thought about that, but some of the songs here are dealing with that. The record is not just about time and perceptions, but it felt rich and right to me to write lyrics which poked at that idea.”
Focused and lean
The album was recorded in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence in the south of France with James Ford. “There were little things James did which made us more decisive. We have a tendency to procrastinate and put off difficult decisions and make songs open-ended. He came in and made us commit and brought a focus and a leanness to the sound.”
As with previous albums, the bands favoured working in unfamiliar surroundings. “We went to France so we could leave England basically. We felt we had to go somewhere fresh to put the songs in a different space and context. We needed an adventure and I think that’s an important part of making a record – you know, packing your bag, saying goodbye to your mates and loved ones and going off for a couple of months to burrow into it.”
For Philippakis, the new album is exactly where he should be in his life. “There’s a feeling now that we’re meant to be here, that this is what we’re supposed to be doing. Personally, I wouldn’t know what else to do with myself. I’m fortunate to be here, but I’m meant to be a musician.
“When Foals started, I was in my first year of university studying English literature. Looking back on it now, I was going ‘of course, I’m going to do music.’ But I didn’t think it would pan out like that or that I’d be in Foals or a rock band. My preoccupation was always with doing something creative, maybe music or something with words.”
“There are no doubts. There were things we wrestled with when we were writing music about whether something was good enough or the right thing or whether it’s resonating properly. But we’ve got better at following our intuition. Anything we’re suspicious of, we step away from. We’re only going to go after what we feel 100 per cent about.”
