Hey, everyone
Reading through this article is so draining. I've read through it more than five times and it's still draining. Billboard actually said Foster The People are recording three albums? It's so jarring. I wonder why no one's talking about it albeit three years later. Let's dive in.
It's been seven years since the band released “Sacred Hearts Club” and four years since releasing the EP “In The Darkest Of Nights, Let The Birds Sing”, so it makes sense they'd begin working on the follow up to their last effort. This time around, for the new album, the genres in question range from 1950 to 1980 as well as meditation music. That seems like a lot of incongruent sounds mishmashed together. I honestly don't know how to feel about this, and I find it quite unsettling to say the least.
“I would say that the headspace that we’re in right now, there’s multiple records that we’ve been working on, that are all very different from each other," Foster says. “We’ve got one record that’s a little bit more in the ’50s and ’60s realm, we’ve got another in the ’70s and ’80s realm, and then we’ve got an abstract instrumental record that plays with solfeggio frequencies and ancient tunings. I wouldn’t call it a meditation record, but it’s more of a high concept record and is predominantly instrumental.”
Between the years of 2018 to 2021, Foster The People released a slew of random singles: “All About You”, “Ride or Die”, “Worst Nites”, “Imagination”, "Pick U Up", and “Style”. Whether these tracks are on the new album remains to be seen. I guess I was expecting the band's next chapter to be more like that than what they actually have planned.
Reading through this article triggers nasty flashbacks of when Green Day released "Uno, Dos, Tre" in 2012. Writing a trilogy sounds like a setup for disaster. Case in point, according to the article, the fact that founding member Mark Pontius jumped ship in the middle of recording the instrumentals confirms this superstition.
“The instrumental record was the last thing we were working on, and we actually were doing it at Mark’s house. It’s not totally finished yet, but creatively, we all did that together. With the other two records, most of those early ideas are the demos I’ve been doing at my studio in L.A. over the last two and a half years,” the frontman says. “We’ve done a portion of that with Mark, but a lot of the band’s songwriting starts with a singular song that I’ll start alone, or I’ll start something with Isom and then we will flesh it out when it’s time to actually record the proper finished master. We’ll just try to sonically work around what’s there and make the song sound ready to be played so we wouldn’t be embarrassed if it was played on the radio.”
Billboard also mentioned the next Foster The People albums will be more organic. I guess that's okay. If they're going this route, I’m going to miss the electronics from SHC and Torches, but anything they do is beautiful. This sounds like something close to "Supermodel"?
“I think letting the soul of ‘60s and ‘70s breeze in and allowing there be imperfections in the music is something that we’re very cognizant of while recording,” Foster added. “With the music that we’re making right now, I’m really interested in going back to the techniques that were being used in the ’60s and ’70s and actually trying to make a record in that old school way while still using modern techniques. Sonically, I imagine if John Lennon had access to all the synthesizers that we had today, that he would have been like a kid in a candy store. He would have used every tool available to him for songwriting, and pushed the envelope of creativity.”
I truly hope for the best, but the truth of the matter is, I've never known Foster The People to be this ambitious. I wonder what's brought this on. I'm only posting this since Billboard is a credible source.