Interview “I feel like we’re in a creative peak” - Foals talk new album

When you’ve been a band for over a decade and then one of the cogs is removed, it can break the entire machine. Yet when bassist Walter Gervers decided to leave Foals ahead of beginning work on the follow up to 2015’s ‘What Went Down’, the now-quartet decided to use their new dynamic to their advantage.

“We physically couldn’t write in the same way anymore because we couldn’t just get in the room and bash everything out with two guitars, keys and bass,” begins frontman Yannis Philippakis, “so it meant between us it was more fluid. Edwin played bass, I played some bass; I was producing more so I’d sit back in certain ways that maybe I haven’t done before. It lead to this creative peak that I feel like we’re in because we mixed stuff up and shuffled the deck a bit.”

Recorded and entirely self-produced by the band with Yannis at the helm in Peckham, following an enforced break where the four members “allowed our worlds to get smaller and domestic again until that got unbearable”, the tactic worked so well that the band are now sitting on not one but two new albums – ‘Everything Not Saved Will Be Lost - Part One’ (due 8th March) and a second part, set for release in the autumn.

Initially unplanned, the double whammy comes simply from reaching a natural creative purple patch. “There was a lot of material, but also we just loved it all; we didn’t feel like there was anything that was chaff,” says the singer simply. “We were concerned that we didn’t wanna make some kind of indulgent prog record, but the feedback from everyone was that it was all too good to lose…”