The story behind Foals’ greatest riff: “At one point it was 27 minutes long”
It wasn’t all that apparent just how mammoth Foals would grow across the alternative music world back in the mid-2000s.
Formed amid the decade’s indie roll around in jammy post-punk and alt-dance stylings, the Oxford outfit’s debut Antidotes album and preceding singles carried much of the gang’s predecessor band Edmund Fitzgerald’s angular mathiness, before sonically loosening up with deeper fluid textures on sophomore Total Life Forever.
But to longtime fans, it’s 2013’s Holy Fire that saw Foals step forward to a more strident and pivotal creative path, recruiting the production pair Flood and Alan Moulder behind the likes of Nine Inch Nails, Depeche Mode and U2’s most significant and creatively confounding records.
Overseeing the album’s sessions at the duo’s own Assault & Battery studio in London, Foals sought to deploy novel recording techniques and Svengali leftfield happenings to coax a more personal, primal, and fundamentally organic third LP than had been conjured by the band yet.
Amid rumours of studio interns gathering animal bones for mystical percussion sessions or Flood capturing rehearsals on the sly to glean takes at their rawest, Holy Fire surrounds a band eager to dwell somewhere vastly removed from their former indie planes. The first clue was its lead single. Dropped three months ahead, ‘Inhaler’ presented a shinier yet beefier side to Foals, all sexed-up funk and anthemic art-rock stir scoring frontman Yannis Philippakis’ starkly anguished lyrical confessions.
“It’s about feeling under attack,” Philippakis told NME. “I tapped into that feeling of rush-hour claustrophobia, wanting to scream everybody away and gain space for myself. On a more personal level, it’s about wanting to push away at people and at everything.”
Such thematic disquiet hung in ‘Inhaler’s air. While follow-up single ‘My Number’ flashed the old Foals indie-pop spark and would score the BBC’s coverage of 2013’s Glastonbury Festival, an underlying howl charges Philippakis’ urgent scrabble for escape, flexing a beguilingly dramatic shroud amid its effects, soaked guitar ripples. Far from bottling some explosive heavy attack in the heat of the moment, it turned out that ‘Inhaler’s gargantuan strut had been in gestation for several years despite its urgency.
“’Inhaler’ we kind of half-wrote that on the last tour, guitarist Jimmy Smith told Consequence of Sound, reflecting on the number’s birth during their Total Life Forever Tour. “When we used to play ‘Miami’ live, we used to do like a two-minute jam afterwards, and that’s kind of where the beginning of ‘Inhaler’ came from. That’s where we discovered the groove for that song. And then Yannis would have this fat riff lying around and would be like, ‘Hey, check this out.’ It just came from that.”
Such alchemic fusions resulted in a strange beast of a single, tough but still percolating with Foals’ knack for undulating arrangements and delicate frissons. While the rest of the Holy Fire record didn’t quite match the lead single’s indie fire, ‘Inhaler’ marked a creative gamble that paid off handsomely, pleasantly surprising old fans while pulling in new ones with confident ease.
